Movie Breakdown: The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things (Noah)

Pre-Screening Stance:

It doesn’t matter how many time-loop movies I consume, I’m always at least willing to give another one a chance. This one is, well, it’s a teen time-loop movie. A time-loop flick, but you know, with teenagers.

Post-Screening Ramble:

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is a like memory of other, better temporal abnormality films. Instead of trying to establish petty things like characters or even plot, it just sort of drops the viewer in the midst of a time loop and then refers to other films as a means to explain just what’s going on. Mark (Kyle Allen) is, as the film begins, stuck inside a day, alone in his time repetition until he meets Margaret (Kathryn Newton), another high schooler fated to repeat the same day over and over again. And though it certainly plays with the tropes of your basic repeated-day movie, there isn’t much push in Tiny Things. Instead Mark and Margaret seem, if not okay with being stuck in a permanent time loop, then not bothered by it. Even if Mark misses his mom and rues his father’s lecture about his life, the two just seem to wake up, do the same shit and repeat it all over again. They float through the time loop, rather than aggressively attempt to solve it or even do anything with it. And maybe this is the director implying that even in the midst of a temporal abnormality, teenagers are going to be teenagers but as Mark and Margaret plod through their permanent existence not seeming to care all that much, so too does the audience. And though there are reasons why they don’t push terribly hard to escape, the film lags nonetheless.

One Last Thought:

The film’s greatest weakness is the continued inference that Mark – a jacked up, mini-Brad Pitt who clearly has the lay of the land in any situation – is a high school nerd. Not a chance. This dude beats up geeks in the bathroom and is very popular with the cheerleading squad.