Crew
Director/Screenplay – Keith Jardine, Producers – Tait Fletcher, Heath Hensley, Juergen Heinemann, Keith Jardine, Vince Rose, Donald Sanchez, Mark Steinig, Tara Tovarek & Darren White, Photography – Juergen Heinemann, Music – Lance Bendiksen & Schneider Sienes, Visual Effects – Dead Eye (Supervisor – Vince Rose), Special Effects Supervisor – Justin ‘Hoosty’ Gonzalez, Production Design – Britney Hopper. Production Company – Broken Ear Productions.
Cast
Brendan Fehr (Charlie), Majandra Delfino (Anna), Matthew Page (Sam), Daved Wilkins (Gary), Keith Jardine (David Stijanski), Juliet Lopez (Faye), Michelle Waterston (Sophie), Ryan Jason Cook (Dwayne), Melissa Christopher (Gwen), Tait Fletcher (Fry Cook), Raoul Castillo (Priest/Dr Lovato), Lora Martinez-Cunningham (Dr Beth/News Anchor), Cris Acosta (Marcos), Kelsey Leos Montoya (Tyler), Josh Horton (Dak), Carly Lepard (Liv)
Plot
Charlie walks into a late-night diner. Unknown to the other patrons, Charlie is a wanted serial killer who has been given the nickname The Midnight Mangler. Charlie fixates on the waitress Anna. After Anna leaves at the end of her shift, Charlie approaches her in the parking lot and makes her get into his truck at gunpoint where he kills her. Charlie then finds he is stuck repeating the same events over and over, starting each time from when he walks into the diner. He variously gets to know and kills all of the patrons and staff present in an effort to find a way out of the timeloop.
Groundhog Day (1993) was a reasonable hit when it came out with its plot where Bill Murray is stuck reliving the same day over and over. The surprise about it is just how many subsequent films there have been using the Timeloop theme – everything from Run Lola Run (1998) to Source Code (2011), Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and Palm Springs (2020), even two entire tv series with Day Break (2006-7) and Russian Doll (2019- ). In more recent years, we have seen a number of variants on the timeloop film turned towards horror purposes with the likes of Happy Death Day (2017), The Campus (2018), Brightwood (2022), Re/Member (2022), Until Dawn (2025) and the upcoming Shiver (2027). The opening of the man in a timeloop walking into a diner has surprising similarities to Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2025) that came out later that same year, although both films differ considerable after that point.
Kill Me Again – not to be confused with or related to the Val Kilmer starring thriller Kill Me Again (1991) – is quite different to anything else in the timeloop genre. For one, the entire film, with the exception of a couple of scenes at the end, is confined to the single set of the interior of the diner, the pavement immediately outside and the parking lot behind the diner. For another, the central protagonist in the timeloop is a serial killer who proceeds to kill every single character we meet throughout – multiple times!
There is a lot of fun to watching Kill Me Again as it goes through the same scene over and over again where each variation is teased out in all its nuances and given different twists. Or where Brendan Fehr interacts with the various characters and their little vignettes, bringing out their individual quirks – before usually killing them. It is not a film afraid to delve into dark places but this is done with a good deal of amusement and a surprising amount of cheer for a film with so much slaughter in it. The role of the serial killer is played by Brendan Fehr, previously a teen star of the late 1990s, who gives a surprisingly likeable and even sympathetic performance.
The only off note for me was the twist ending [PLOT SPOILERS] making Kill Me Again one of the few timeloop films with an SF rationale. I didn’t fully follow the explanations – was it a Virtual Reality simulation or some kind of neural stimulation that caused everything to occur inside the prisoner’s head? It does bring the story to a surprising positive upbeat ending that allows redemption for a character that in any other film would be painted as evil.
The film is directed by Keith Jardine who has had a lot of supporting parts usually as thugs and tough guys in film and tv since the late 2000s, including parts in Gamer (2009), Logan (2017), Bird Box (2018), Eddington (2025) and Preacher (2016-9), among others. Jardine can also be seen in the film – he is the tough guy with the bald head who sits eating at one of the tables in the corner and never says anything as Brendan Fehr tries to talk to him.
Trailer here