Happy Death Day opened Friday the 13th in true scary movie fashion, but unlike most, it just wasn’t very scary. While there were a few major issues with the film, there were also moments of brilliance mainly seen in its more technical aspects.

A sorority girl, Tree Gelbman, keeps waking up on her birthday just to get killed over and over again. Eventually, she figures out that in order to stop living the same day she has to find and kill her own killer. Each time she is killed she grows weaker because she sustains part of the injury from her murder and this means that she is running out of time.

One of the main issues in this film is that they never explain why Tree is living the same day over and over again. The writers opted for the fairy tale ending that does little to round out the plot and provides no explanation of how or why she is stuck on the day of her murder or why once she kills her murderer, she will be unstuck in time.

After her visit to the hospital, when she collapsed from her wounds, the issue is never mentioned again. She is apparently perfectly fine with going to the hospital once even though she dies multiple times after that death. If they had circled back to both the reliving and the hospital visit at the end of the film in order to tie up the script’s loose ends the overall movie would have been more satisfactory.

This movie was not scary at all, there was a few jump scares that got a few audience members to scream but it left no one shaking after leaving the theater. Which is disappointing because it had promise to be very scary.

It was not all bad though, the acting was decent and there were moments of excellent camera work. Especially in the scenes were they repeated her actions every day that she had to live again. This made the audience feel her frustration with her because they continually were shown the same series of shots. The repetitiveness of these scenes grounded the audience in a familiar setting that showed how Tree evolved throughout the film.

This film was fun to watch but there were a few errors that took away from the overall effect of the story and cinematography, but there were elements of extreme skill throughout the movie which made it much more enjoyable.