RUN LOLA RUN

Wow, occasionally a film comes along that is so original and perfectly executed that it grabs you by the throat from the start and never lets go.

There's a quick setup at the beginning: Lola's hapless boyfriend Manni has left a bag containing the proceeds of a drug deal (100,000 marks) on a train, and unless he can come up with the money in 20 minutes (!) the bad guy who is expecting the money will kill him.  

And then we're off, or rather Lola is off, running out of her apartment to try to get the money off her rich father who has some senior position at a bank.

As a complication Manni is going to try to rob a nearby supermarket if Lola doesn't come up with the goods on time.

Things go very badly wrong, but that's when the real originality kicks in, because it turns out we are in a time loop film, and we go back to the moment when Lola runs out of the apartment.  This time round, due to small random factors, such as a dog on the stairs of her apartment building, the timing of events is sufficiently thrown off kilter for a different outcome to result.  But it's no better than before, so we go round the loop a third and final time.

There's a delightful amount of invention in how small details combine on each loop to lead to a different time path.

And just for fun, whenever Lola bumps into someone we get a very brief glimpse into that person's future, and of course on each loop that future is an amusingly different one.

The techno soundtrack, co-created by the director Tom Twkyer, is superb, helping to make this a breath-taking kinetic experience lasting a mere 80 minutes.

By coincidence a few days after watching it I listened to a Time Loop edition of the Screen Drafts podcast in which the consensus was that in each iteration of the loop Lola remembers what happened in the previous iteration.  This wasn't my impression, which encourages me to rewatch it one day, which would be no hardship.

RATING: ✓✓ Good Times