How Much Time Actually Passes in the ‘Palm Springs’ Time Loop?

By now, you’ve seen the uproarious time loop comedy Palm Springs on Hulu (or you’re OK reading a lot of spoilers) and are wondering to yourself, “Wait, how much time actually passed in the movie?” The film’s 90-minute runtime covers a deceptively lengthy period of time in the experiences of Andy Samberg’s Nyles and Cristin Milioti’s Sarah, two jaded wedding guests who must learn that the hardest part of living the same day infinitely is learning to live with yourself. The boundless repetition recalls the best of Groundhog Day without ever becoming subservient to Harold Ramis’ classic.

Inspired by a tenacious piece of journalism by Simon Gallagher in 2011 that attempted to pinpoint the precise number of days that Bill Murray’s Phil Connor must relive Groundhog Day, I set out to apply a similarly rigorous methodology to determine how long passes within the Palm Springs time loop. Armed with a Google spreadsheet, a search engine and a helpful phone-a-friend to director Max Barbakow and screenwriter Andy Siara, I pored over Palm Springs like it was the Zapruder film to come to my closest approximation of how many times Nyles and Sarah relive November 9.

(By the way, does that date sound familiar? According to the filmmakers, I’m the first person to identify the reason they chose this given day on the calendar was because it was the day after the 2016 election. Maybe that just means I’m caught in a loop of that day’s jumble of feelings myself…)

Of note, this is a fairly strict textualist analysis. I’m strictly going off what there’s evidence in Palm Springs to support, and I did my best to show my work so you can recreate and recalculate should you choose. (I do not necessarily recommend this as the best way to experience the movie.) Perhaps your analysis could get closer to the number Andy Siara threw out to Decider‘s own Anna Menta of over forty years. But as for me…

Easy: The Time That We See Unfold

The simplest measure of the time in Palm Springs are the days we see unfold as part of the main narrative. We meet up with Nyles when he’s already well-situated within the framework of the time loop, idling the day away and numbing his senses with poolside brews. Like the alarm clock hitting 6:00 A.M. and the radio blaring “I Got You Babe” in Groundhog Day, we have a strong visual cue that a new version of November 9 is starting with an extreme close-up of Nyles and Sarah’s eyes.

In a few instances, particularly with montages, I made the logical leap based on the time of day in which two events take place to determine that it would not be possible for them to coincide within the same loop. With the exception of assorted flashbacks, the following days proceed in chronological order:

Day 1: Sarah goes into the cave and gets pulled into the loop.
Day 2: Sarah’s first repeated day.
Day 3: Sarah drives back to Austin.
Day 4: Nyles explains the time loop in Sarah’s car.
Day 5: Nyles and Sarah discuss sex at the bar, Sarah tries to end the loop with good karma.
Day 6: Sarah wakes up again in the loop, goes to waste day with Nyles at the “safehouse.”
Days 7-14: Montage of Sarah and Nyles embracing meaningless of life with assorted hijinks culminating in desert campout where Sarah and Nyles have sex for the first time*

(*I originally assumed the campout was a separate day, but thanks to a tip from Cristin Milioti interviewed in Vulture, I learned that it actually follows the evening where they plant the bomb in the wedding cake. Per Milioti, Sarah’s hook is hidden in her coat but issues with coverage prevented them from showing it more explicitly. This also tracks given that we don’t have any shots of them waking up preceding the scene.)

Day 15: Nyles reveals he’s slept with Sarah before she entered the loop.
Day 16: Sarah wakes up and goes to start studying physics, Nyles unable to find her at resort.

Unlike Groundhog Day, which stays laser-focused on Carl, Palm Springs splits its two characters up here. By my count, we see the same amount of days Nyles and Sarah’s sequences apart. (More on how long these sequences actually last in a bit.) But for the purposes of simply enumerating the days we actually see in the film, the section of the film where Sarah educates herself and Nyles realizes his love for her in that absence constitutes Days 17-22. Also during this time, Sarah tests out her quantum physics theory by blowing up a goat in the cave to see if it breaks out of the time loop, and Nyles makes peace with Roy at his home in Irvine.

That makes the day in which Sarah arrives to let Nyles in on her plan to blow herself up in the cave to break the time loop Day 23.

After the detonation, the film has one final scene where they float in the safehouse pool, presumably on November 10 and a mid-credits stinger where J.K. Simmons’ Roy, an unwitting participant pulled into the loop who mostly channels his rage into torturing Nyles, has apparently received a voice message we see Sarah leaving on Day 23 and has come back to the wedding to discuss it. (Nyles, clad in a suit rather than his casual pool gear, appears not to recognize him.)

We’ll set aside these last two scenes for now and say that, for the sake of setting a preliminary baseline, we irrefutably see 23 days unfold within the time loop of Palm Springs.

Moderate: The Flashbacks and Montages

Now things start getting a little trickier. Especially as Nyles explains the rules and limitations of the time loop to Sarah, the film cuts away to glimpses of scenes from his life prior to her getting stuck.

The first major flashback sequence comes whenever Sarah fully processes that on the night she gets pulled into the loop, Roy shoots Nyles with a bow-and-arrow. This prompts Nyles to explain how, when the two of them embark on a cocaine-fueled bender, he semi-consciously encourages Roy to enter the cave and enter the loop after an off-handed remark about wanting to live out in the desert forever. We then see five different scenarios that play out of Roy taking revenge: shooting a fleeing naked Nyles with an arrow, electrocuting him, waterboarding him, whipping him and filling Nyles’ safehouse pool with flammable liquid so he can immolate his enemy. Simply what we see adds 5 days to the total.

(It’s possible that the whipping and the electrocution could be the same setup as the setting does look the same. Whether that’s due to the indie budget and shooting schedule not allowing another location, or this is just someplace like Roy’s garage that he would have easy access to, it’s not a stretch to presume these were different days.)

Nyles mentions that Roy “comes around every few days…or weeks?” Considering the elaborate nature of the revenge schemes we see, it’s likely that the gaps between Roy’s reappearances are due to him planning, procuring the necessary supplies or observing Nyles’ habits so he can plot when and where to wreak havoc. Let’s operate that his attacks happen at a frequency on the longer end of Nyles’ estimation, and I’ll use the smallest definition of “few” as three. There’s also only so much he can accomplish in a day given that he wakes up in Irvine every morning, at best an hour and twenty minutes away. We’ll add twenty days of prep time to each of Roy’s revenge schemes and also account for the lead-up to the incident Sarah witnesses. That adds 125 days.

Then there’s Nyles talking about the various sexual escapades he’s had while trapped in the loop. We see a dispiriting hand-job from wedding barkeep Daisy, a hookup with barfly Darla, an unsuccessful attempt to woo the bride Tala and experimenting with groomsman Jerry. Simply what we see adds 4 days to the total.

When Sarah asks if Nyles has been having sex in the loop, he answers, “I have [had sex with other people], but it takes a lot of work … and I try to live my life with as little effort as possible.” So, in addition to the day in which he succeeds, we have to take into account the fact that Nyles needs to work his way up to learning how to win over his conquests. Let’s start with the baseline that it takes him 14 days to sleep with Sarah when he’s not overtly manipulating her with accumulated knowledge (and is generally pretty lackadaisical about life). I’ll be generous and say it takes 10 days, with effort, when he turns the charm on to bed each of these people. I’m tempted to give him more for trying to get with Tala, the bride, but the jokiness of the attempt we see makes me think he didn’t take the quest too seriously. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg, but we can safely assume that the real time frame of what we see in the sex montage is more akin to 40 days.

I also contemplated that what I originally labeled Days 7-14, the montage of Sarah and Nyles nihilistically enjoying their shared fate in the loop, might have some hidden days associated with it. In particular, the scene in Day 10 where the duo bursts into the bar and does an elaborate choreography routine feels like it might have taken some time to learn. But the combination of seeing start practicing it before (on Day 7), Nyles’ skillful dance prowess seen on Day 1 and Max Barbakow pointing out that Sarah teaching him some moves implies that perhaps she has some pre-existing talent leads me to believe this is not too elaborately planned. For once, I won’t overthink this one.

NEW CUMULATIVE TOTAL: 188 days (just over 6 months)

Medium: Sarah’s Physics Binge

The scene lasts two minutes and spans six days that we see, but Sarah educating herself enough to come up with a quantum physics-based theory to escape the loop clearly lasts much, much longer. According to Andy Siara, one draft of the screenplay originally inserted a title card at the end of the montage to spell out just how long it takes her to accumulate the knowledge and show up ready to share with Nyles. This was ultimately jettisoned so early in the process that Siara was unable to recall how long they had said.

“She gets probably multiple PhDs in that time,” he speculated. “How long does it take with someone with not even a passion or an interest, really, in quantum physics to get a PhD, or to force themselves to get multiple PhDs?”

At the very least, Sarah has eclipsed the knowledge of Dr. Clifford V. Johnson, a USC physics professor who she video chats with to discuss her theory about how her plan would allow “access to the indeterministic universe on the other side of the Cauchy horizon.” Stumped, his reply is that it sounds like Sarah doesn’t even need his help. Per Johnson’s faculty page at USC, his educational background is only single PhD in addition to his BSc. If Wikipedia is correct, that education likely took him seven years to complete presuming his undergraduate education took four years. (This does not even factor in that Dr. Johnson has nearly three decades of teaching and research experience since completing his PhD in 1992.)

So, at the bare minimum, Sarah needs at least seven years’ worth of education in quantum physics to go toe-to-toe with Dr. Johnson. We can probably knock off a little bit of time because she’s going to be laser-focused on physics and not spending time on general education credits that take up semesters’ worth a student’s college tenure. Sarah is also going to be on a bit of an accelerated trajectory since we’re led to believe this is all she is doing; it’s almost as if she’s doing a degree in compressed “summer school”-like mode. When she wakes up at 9:40 A.M., per the time on her phone on Day 2, she quickly flees the resort grounds to evade Nyles’ detection and begins her studies at a restaurant off the premises until at least sundown (which would be roughly 4:46 P.M. on November 9). Let’s say she’s putting in 6-to-7 hour days of class every day, consecutively, and then doing any coursework

On Day 16, Sarah pulls up edX and surveys a row of four classes: Quantum Mechanics for Everyone, Plasmonics: From Fundamentals to Modern Applications, Applications of Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Cryptography. Let’s assume she takes all of these and takes the most time possible (which is still generous) as suggested in the course descriptions. That would be 454 hours, which would be at least 65 days of Sarah’s time. So, let’s extrapolate from there that every undergraduate class will be roughly 16 days of Sarah’s life, knowing that some will take more and others will require less. To get a B.S. in Physics with a concentration in Applied Physics at Rice University, from whom she takes PHY 202, Sarah would need to take 15 classes. Therefore, to get her undergraduate degree, I reason it would take 240 days.

As for the PhD, it gets a little trickier given how much that degree is based on research, guided study and the production of a dissertation. But per Rice, it takes 90 credit hours to earn their PhD in Physics, roughly 33% more of a courseload. And since the level of complexity has jumped up, I think it would take her 20 days for each of her 20 classes. For her PhD to at least be somewhere in the ballpark of Dr. Johnson, Sarah spends 400 days earning her PhD in Physics.

Physics isn’t the only thing Sarah learns in her extended vacation from Nyles, though. When she shows up to unveil her theory to him, she boasts an increased emotional intelligence as well. Siara suggested, “You could factor that in as well, how long it would take to achieve some sense of enlightenment to not be bogged down by the petty shit?” Barbakow compared her Zen state to the story of Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree, a Buddhist text in which the Buddha meditates under a tree to achieve a state of enlightenment. This took him 49 days, which I’d say would be the bare minimum she’d need – separate from her academic pursuits – to arrive where she is.

That brings the total time between Sarah snapping and Sarah being at peace to 689 days at the very least, just shy of two years.

NEW CUMULATIVE TOTAL: 877 days (almost 2.5 years)

Hard: Nyles’ Off-Handed Comments and Other Hints

Alright, now comes the toughest part of this task. Unlike Groundhog Day, there’s a whole world of events in the time loop that happen well before the audience joins in. Nyles, whether it’s because of his alcoholism, his fatalism, or some combination of both, has long given up on marking accomplishments or time spent. When I asked the filmmakers if they, or Andy Samberg, approached the pre-Sarah period in the loop with any notions of how much time had passed, they said there was no agreed-upon number. So, what we have to go on are the clues we get from Nyles – which are vague at best, fuzzy at worst.

For instance, on Day 1, Nyles cruises through the dance floor to make his way through Sarah with a precise finesse that implies he knows everyone’s exact positions and moves. I counted eight calibrated maneuvers; given his alcohol consumption and general lackadaisical attitude toward life, I think each of them take a day for him to learn and retain. So add 8 days.

Later on Day 1, Nyles leads Sarah to a window outside the room where his girlfriend Misty is receiving oral sex from the wedding officiant. Nyles professes, “There’s not a world where they don’t end up together,” which would imply he knows from extensive experience that there’s no way to stop her from getting with him. While we don’t have much of a baseline of where their relationship was prior to the loop, I’d say his indifference towards her that we see would suggest he tried for 30 days before realizing that their union was fated. (I’ve luckily never faced the inevitability of a cheating partner, so if anyone wants to correct me here, feel free!)

On that same day, Nyles brilliantly times a pun to Sarah, telling her “you don’t need a leg up” right as Misty moans “hold my leg up!” It’s tough to tell in the moment whether it’s a joke played for her or an irony only perceptible to the audience, but Barbakow confirmed it was very much calculated. “He’s the master of that universe,” the director explained. “He uses it to achieve whatever means that are going to get him off, either literally or figuratively.” I don’t think this adds another day, though, as he likely has the unimpeded version of their tryst memorized from the period in which he was more actively trying to thwart it.

On Day 2, Nyles knows the exact time of the earthquake that opens up the cave in which they enter the loop. He has no watch, phone or clock that will tell him the time – he knows it intuitively. I’d say that level of knowledge implies at least a year of pinpointing the quake and adapting to its daily shock.

On Day 3, Nyles mentions to Sarah’s parents when she goes missing that she could be scared of “melanoma, nanotech, round-the-clock surveillance, sauce.” These are highly specific references, which leads me to think it’s too random to dismiss as a throwaway line. Maybe they are ways that Roy has targeted him? (I don’t know about melanoma…) Either way, let’s add 4 days.

Nyles makes reference on Day 4 to his attempts to get out of the loop by taking his own life, saying “I’ve done a lot of suicides … so many…” We don’t get any concrete sense of how many times he’s tried. Nyles knows to put his head in front of the airbag for an immediate death when Sarah attempts a vehicular death, and he makes reference twice to there being nothing worse than slowly dying in the ICU. Let’s take those instances as at least three suicides and add on double the Groundhog Day total of nine suicides to add 21 days to the count. It’s probably still an undercount, but given that Niles asks Misty to kill him (somewhat in jest) during the opening scene, it leads me to believe the impulse for suicidal ideation has not been entirely squelched.

On Day 5, Nyles makes memorable reference to a failed escape: “One time I smoked a lot of crystal and made it all the way to Equatorial Guinea … it was a huge waste of time.” Given the effort and time this would take, rendering it impossible to combine with any other events, add 1 day.

When Nyles plays darts in the bar on Day 5, he’s able to hit two bullseyes in darts flawlessly and only misses the mark on his third throw because Sarah interjects with her recollection of Roy. It’s tempting to go the full Malcolm Gladwell/10,000 hours and assume Nyles has become a master of darts, but I think that’s too generous. He doesn’t need to be a master of an entire craft, just figure out the exact right spot from which to throw the darts and be able to replicate it flawlessly. I’d say given Nyles’ predilection for alcohol, he’s probably spent enough time playing darts in a bar that he wouldn’t be as knew to the skill as Sarah is to physics. Let’s add 60 days to the count, during which time he’d become so familiar with the patrons and their positioning that he would know he’s able to swipe a hat off the guy sitting near the pool table on his way out.

While Nyles is sick of Abe and Tala’s wedding by the time we meet him in the loop, it’s clearly because he’s spent a ton of time there. When describing the day he brought Roy into the loop, Nyles mentions that this occurred “before I’d really acquainted myself with everyone” at the wedding. This would imply that, to some extent, he gets to know all the guests to some extent. Based on wide shots of the wedding crowd, there appear to be 64 other people attending: 56 in the crowd, 3 groomsmen and bridesmaids, the couple and the officiant. Subtract Nyles from that count as well as his girlfriend Misty, and that makes 62 opportunities for acquaintance. While he might have known some of them before, Nyles does seem to be craving the socialization at least by the time he gets to know Roy since he bothers to wear a nice suit on that particular day. Let’s be generous here and give him five days to know each person, adding 320 days to the count. (This would also explain how he knows all the words to the officiants’ homily during a cutaway shot on Day 5.)

On Day 6, Nyles is able to cycle through an entire argument with Misty where he can recite what she’s going to say as she’s saying it – including her reaction to his being able to copy her. There are eight different lines, which I think he’d have to pick up over the course of 8 days as he learns each consecutive response.

Later that day, he takes Sarah to his safehouse pool for the first time, mentioning that he knows the family who owns the home doesn’t come back on November 9. That would mean he’s spent a full day there and knows for a fact they won’t return, adding 1 day to the count.

On Day 16, Nyles angrily reveals something big he’s been hiding from Sarah: prior to her joining in the loop, they had in fact had sex. “Oh, please, you’ve fucked me a thousand times,” he mutters under his breath. “All I had to do was bail you out with that ridiculous speech at the wedding,” he says in reference to the speech we see him give on Day 1 – and has likely given many times before. (“I would say this is maybe the best version of it he’s given,” Barbakow said.) It’s hard to imagine taking either of those statements too literally given his frustration in the moment. But what if we apply the American Pie 2 “rule of three” where you assume men exaggerate their sexual conquests by a factor of three? That’s 333 days where they have sex, plus you add 5 days for him figuring out how to crack the seduction element (5 days where he gets to know her like any other guest at the wedding have already been included in the count).

On Day 23, Nyles must crucially lean on a piece of personal information he’s learned from shooting range operator Spuds in order to gain access to a mode of transportation that will get him to Sarah before she enters the cave to blow herself up. It’s possible Nyles could have gleaned this from Day 6 when he and Sarah aim their fire at the picture posted on the target: the man who stole Spuds’ wife. But given the level of personal, precise detail he’s able to give, I’m inclined to believe this stems from a longer relationship where Spuds felt he could open up a little bit more. Let’s give it 10 days.

And in the scene following the explosion in the cave, Nyles makes a mention that shocks Sarah: prior to the loop, he had a “shaggy dog.” I refuse to believe he’s the kind of person who didn’t try to bring a good boy back, so I’m going to add 5 days for some attempts to get the canine companionship.

From these little nuggets, often little more than just a line or a gesture from Nyles, I think we can safely point to at least 1,171 days that he spends in the time loop – over three years – prior to Sarah entering the loop. None of this takes into account what are likely numerous days in which he contents himself entirely by doing nothing by the pool, but alas, there’s nothing in the text of Palm Springs that would provide any basis for estimation. (There are no meaning-altering deleted scenes, either – I asked!)

I’d be tempted to leave it there, but there’s one element that Barbakow and Siara highlighted for me that overrides all these moments…

In a crucial scene of emotional rapport between Nyles and Sarah on Day 15, she asks what he did for work before getting stuck in the loop. He pauses, stares blankly for an uncomfortable beat and confesses that he’s honestly forgotten. Given his frequent inaccessibility, it’s tough to tell if he’s being sincere in this moment or stonewalling. But according to Siara, Nyles is not lying. “He has to have been in there long enough for him not to remember what his life was like prior to this,” he told me.

While age and time is likely a big part of this, I think another component that cannot be overlooked is the potential effect that Nyles’ drinking has. Not to get on a soapbox here, but there is some research showing some links between excessive alcohol consumption and memory loss. A 2017 study by Massachusetts General Hospital found that “in general, drinking to excess—more than 21 drinks in a week for four or five years—is bad for brain health in most individuals,” with potential symptoms including memory loss. Forgetting your job is a pretty big one, even though it might not be too much of a stretch if you haven’t thought about what it was in years, so I won’t err as conservatively as I usually do in my estimates. The overarching time encompassing all of Nyles’ loop life is at least 1,826 days. (I guess I could have just led with this, but where’s the fun in that?)

NEW CUMULATIVE TOTAL: 2,703 days (almost 7.5 years)

Galaxy Brain: Did Blowing Up The Cave Work?

You might have noticed that I declined to weigh in on whether the final two scenes in the film’s chronology add to the total. Here is the part where I punt: I don’t know.

In my conversation with Barbakow and Siara, they planted a seed of doubt in my head that maybe we shouldn’t take those scenes quite at face value. It’s easy to assume that since the family returns to the safehouse, it must be November 10. But do we know if Sarah actually got the goat to break the loop? As they enter the cave, Nyles asks her if she was bluffing about testing on the goat, and her response of “too late, you’ve already committed” does not inspire full confidence. There are just enough wrinkles to raise my suspicions that everything might not be as seamless as it appears. (And it’s also possible, given the innuendo of her final line to Sarah, that June Squibb’s Nana might be somehow involved in the loop herself – I cannot be dragged down that rabbit hole as well!)

This uncertainty is not meant to imply laziness on the part of the filmmakers, to be clear. “Max and I exhausted ourselves talking about it,” Siara said when discussing how they built the framework for the film’s time loop structure. “We know the rules of this world like the back of our hands because I really did not want anyone to be able to poke holes in it.”

This isn’t a post speculating about the science of the ending of Palm Springs because that’s a different question and post entirely. I suspect it might have something to do with the concept raised by Sarah, the Cauchy horizon – “the spot where determinism breaks down, where the past no longer determines the future,” per a UC Berkley blog post – but don’t take it from the guy who couldn’t handle a month of high school honors physics. And even if my bearings of interpreting it are off by a bit, what’s a day or two’s difference after such extensive guesstimation?

It’s not that the science and physics of the climax don’t matter, only that there’s something else more important: Nyles and Sarah have broken a loop of their own destructive, self-loathing behaviors. Understanding just how long they wallowed in them only serves to underscore what a monumental moment overcoming their hang-ups represents.

“It comes to the final question of did the cave work or not, but we always wanted to get to that point where it doesn’t matter,” Siara said of the ending. “Because what matters most is when they [Nyles and Sarah] walk into that cave hand in hand and decide to take that plunge together.” MY FINAL COUNT REMAINS AT 2,703 DAYS for the loop, less because I trust the sketchy science and more because I believe in the power of people to change themselves and each other. Without this emotional pull, there would have been no inspiration for me to put such obsessive devotion into cataloguing Palm Springs in the first place.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.

Watch Palm Springs on Hulu