Or is it? When Aggie wakes up the next morning, it is, shockingly, the next morning. The time loop has been cracked. She’s free to live her life without the knowledge of what is going to happen next. Aggie can see a park skateboarder land a trick she’s been watching them fail at for ten years. She can take Tessa to the race track and watch the demolition derby she’s been hearing about ad nauseam but was positive she was never going to get to experience (even if she never enjoyed motorsports before the time loop). Everything is new.

Marchant and codirector Heather Ballish do a fabulous job of letting their film breathe. The story gets to play out at a measured pace. Aggie not only gets the joy of living a new day but also the inherent fear one that goes along with it. And then there is the added pressure of realizing that she knows many of the people in her town — but they don’t know her at all. This can be an unexpected problem.

Another aspect of the production that drew me in is that, while their experiences as a young Trans woman and a questioning Lesbian (Tessa had always considered herself straight until she bonded with Aggie) certainly influence their journeys, they don’t define them. Instead, Marchant’s confident screenplay lets the duo be messy, complicated human beings. Gender and sexuality are pieces of who they are, facets of their personality. But there’s so much more to them.

This reminded me of Richard Linklater’s breakout 1990 sensation Slacker, or the late, great Lynn Shelton’s uncomfortably hilarious Humpday: low-budget, cinema verité, and/or mumblecore stunners that allowed their protagonists the freedom of fully detailed lives outside of the few precious days we spend with them. This made their emotional centers authentic. The world these filmmakers created was real, and the audience was the engrossed fly on the wall, greedily taking everything in. 

This makes Marchant’s ingenious opus a remarkable debut. It’s made up of quiet, breathtaking observations, including moments of intense pain, indescribable joy, and points in between. Aggie and Tessa’s relationship is far more elaborate than it appears, and the roadblocks littered across their path aren’t going to be easy to navigate. Each has held something important back from the other, and when the revelations start to take shape, the reverberations are earth-shattering.

The film is magnificently shot by director of photography Laffrey Witbrod (who also lensed the superb mountain climbing doc The Ascent, winner of the audience award for Best Documentary at March’s SXSW Film Festival). Shot in and around Aberdeen and Hoquiam (places, I admit, I am very familiar with), the visuals have a glorious multidimensionality. A few of the layered shots, especially at the demolition derby, blew me away with how the foreground and background remained in equal focus. It’s incredible.

But Witbrod never loses sight of the bigger picture. We may see Aggie, Tessa, and a whole sequence of busted-out cars battling away in a single frame, but it’s still clear what the takeaway from a moment like this is and who we should be concentrating our attention on. The emotional center is obvious. Aggie’s dealing with many new sensations while also coming to grips with a plethora of unexpected personal revelations, and she’s doing it in an ever-shifting environment that she thought she knew all there was to know about it — until this new day inexplicably began.

There are some slight hiccups during the middle stretch, especially after Aggie discovers what caused the time loop. But this leads to some of the most priceless vignettes, including a gentle nod to the ghost of Kurt Cobain and a haunting scene between Marchant and Abigail Thorn that left me speechless. Yet I’m also not certain I buy that things would work out quite as they do at the end. There are moments of the climax that gave me momentary pause.

But only momentary. Marchant announces herself as a major talent. This is a decidedly Trans journey of self-acceptance and understanding, but also a universally accessible drama of longing, forgiveness, empathy, transformation, and love that goes far beyond standard Queer stereotypes or melodramatic convention. Again Again tasks its characters to live their lives as if today were their last and the unknown possibilities of tomorrow were far from a given. And it wants everyone in the audience to do the same. It’s scary stuff. It’s also beautiful. This is one of the year’s best films.

Again Again makes its world premiere tonight, Monday, May 11 at 6:30pm during the Seattle International Film Festival at the SIFF Cinema Uptown. It has two more showings, also at the Uptown on May 12 and May 15. All tickets are currently on standby.

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