“Go on and close the curtains
‘Cause all we need is candlelight
You and me, and a bottle of wine
To hold you tonight (oh, yeah)
Well, we know I’m going away
And how I wish, I wish it weren’t so
So take this wine and drink with me
And let’s delay our misery”– “Save Tonight” by Eagle-Eye Cherry
Whatever their general conceit, time loop films are about confronting a truth being run from. It could be about the life being lived by the protagonist, that they must turn toward civility and humility (Groundhog Day); it could be about facing a terrible grief (The Map of Tiny Perfect Things); about overcoming a horrifying beast (All You Need Is Kill); or learning that sometimes what we think is the truth matters as much as what the truth is in constructing our reality (Rewrite). Time loop tales come in all genres, too, — horror, fantasy, action, adventure, thriller, coming of age — as their structure allows for ample exploration of cruelty and kindness, the superficial and the profound, in equal measure. What sets one time loop story apart from the rest is the way in which the looping is executed and all that happens from the start of the loop to its inevitable end. Director Nicholas Clifford (We’ve All Been Here) manages to make a strong impression with One More Shot, his feature film debut, not just because of its method of looping or the fact that looping is an active choice by the protagonist, but because of the way in which the arc of the narrative manages to eke out surprises that keep one engaged amid the expected.
Emily Browning as Minnie in ONE MORE SHOT. Photo Credit: Ben King. Photo courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films.
Anesthesiologist Minnie (Emily Browning) is having a hard time of things. She’s still single, childless, living on a foldout couch at a friend’s increasingly unwelcoming home, and her last relationship ended two years ago, but she’s so dissociated that she still thinks it was six months ago. A change appears to be in the air, however, as she and her friends are getting together to ring in the end of 1999 and the beginning of 2000, and among the group is their friend and her former beau, Joe (Sean Keenan). But each choice she makes seems to lead to greater calamity and group discord until she takes a shot from a bottle of alcohol gifted to her long ago and she’s transported back to the start of the night. What begins as a maudlin passive evening of nostalgia turns toward active engagement as Minnie tries to change her fate, but can she do it before the bottle runs out?
Sean Keenan as Joe in ONE MORE SHOT. Photo Credit: Ben King. Photo courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films.
Written by Alice Foulcher (That’s Not Me) and Gregory Erdstein (That’s Not Me), based on a story by Heather Wilson (Itch), One More Shot has all the appearances of a story we know and an outcome we expect: the lovelorn friend whose managed to come out a little screwed up from their experiences, unable to lift themselves out of their stupor, and who doesn’t see the mess they’ve made of themselves by perpetually looking backward and failing to see what’s in front of them. Browning, known from her work on series American Gods and A Series of Unfortunate Events, as well as films Sleeping Beauty (2011) and Sucker Punch (2011), manages to make Minnie someone we want to root for, despite the lack of self-awareness she possesses. The actor infuses Minnie with a slight affability which makes some of the snark delivered unto Minnie by Contessa Treffone’s Max, the partner of friend Flick (Anna McGahan), come off as one-sided and rude, until more and more details of Minnie’s past come to light. None of them are particularly distressing in the sense that Minnie would lose favor with the audience, but they do help color how the rest of these friends see her, why they react to things the way they do, and why Minnie’s choices — even absent the ability to time travel — are the pinnacle of insanity. To be precise, the deviation from an outside force causing the looping to it being an active choice Minnie pursues shifts the film from the predictable into the arena of the unexpected while simultaneously making the experience of looping the result of Minnie trying to make things happen in a predictable or controlled fashion, the result of which is a variety of situations in which Minnie screws up either through personal catastrophe or tangentially through her friends, resulting in the same things happening again and again. This seems obvious given the nature of the narrative structure (the looping that requires Minnie to experience the same few hours over and over), except, unlike other tales, the things that occur are more often the result of Minnie’s repeated action or inaction, thereby making it far more significant when she starts breaking the cycle with even the smallest of choices.
L-R: Contessa Treffone as Max, Anna McGahan as Flick, Emily Browning as Minnie, Pallavi Sharda as Pia, and Ashley Zukerman as Rodney in ONE MORE SHOT. Photo Credit: Ben King. Photo courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films.
This specific element is what helps One More Shot transcend expectations as the looping and thematic elements intersect. Time loop stories often require the protagonist to interrogate themselves until they transform and are, therefore, freed from the loop itself. Because Foulcher and Erdstein make the looping occur whenever Minnie drinks from a specific bottle, the causation of the loop is a choice she must makes which correlates to the character who keeps choosing to be stuck in the rut that finds her longing for the known and unable to accept the unknown. Again, through tiny pieces of dialogue, we learn that Minnie doesn’t have things as together as she seems to, so if you don’t get any red flags from the initial comedic opening, more and more appear throughout to help illustrate the loop that Minnie is in well before the magic alcohol comes into the picture. Impressively, the bottle as a representation of an active choice possesses a duality. It’s not only the exact tool Minnie needs in order to reset time (thereby becoming something she must do or trigger to reset the loop), it’s also a manifestation of the reality that she keeps making the same choices regardless of their outcomes. Intentionally or not, this reveals quite a bit of tragedy masquerading as entertaining comedy. There are several examples of this in the trailer with depictions of the situations Minnie finds herself in as a result of trying and failing over and over to win back Joe; however, though outrageous in their presentation (and convincingly sold by Browning), these are not the kinds of things we should be laughing at, rather, we should be interrogating why we find it so entertaining and why it is that Minnie is willing to push herself so far. To that end, the use of the alcohol as the catalyst for looping also transforms the active choice into a metaphor for using alcohol to mask larger issues of self-harm, but the film doesn’t linger on this enough to make a larger case for the intriguing nature of said concept — though it does create some of the pallor that makes the comedic bits a little more heartbreaking as the alcohol is little more than a salve to delay the experience of misery.
L-R: Hamish Michael as C-Word, Emily Browning as Minnie, Ashley Zukerman as Rodney, and Pallavi Sharda as Pia in ONE MORE SHOT. Photo Credit: Ben King. Photo courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films.
Even when the rest of the film falls into the as-expected, well-worn narrative route of a time loop, there are enough surprises and unexplored subtext that One More Shot not only earns its ending, it invites attentive audiences to consider the adventure beyond the runtime. It’s a shame that the film only really explores the characters of Minnie and Joe with the barest of information collected about the other party-goers/longtime friends because there’s material worth digging into as it relates to this core group and their complicated dynamics. This isn’t so much an issue of “what one wishes they do versus what the film does” as it is a notation that what the film does, it does well, it’s just that there’s a clear sense of something missing due to the tighter focus and teases of a deeper group lore. Maybe it’s just because, for example, one wishes there was more to Max being a brat to Minnie consistently beyond subtext so as to better understand that maybe Max isn’t being a brat and is merely at the end of their rope regarding a potential free-loader who may be lacking in reciprocity as a house guest. However, given what is, One More Shot is a fine tale with a compelling approach, even if it does more to serve as a showcase for Browning’s talents than anything else.
In theaters, on VOD, and digital December 12th, 2025.
For more information, head to the official Samuel Goldwyn Films One More Shot webpage.
Final Score: 3 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews, streaming
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