One More Time Parent Guide

One More Time is a neither romantic nor comedic Swedish rom-com directed by Jonatan Etzler and starring Hedda Stiernstedt as Amelia. Amelia is deep in midlife crisis mode, getting fired from her dead-end job on her fortieth birthday. She is full of regrets on how she has wasted her life and profoundly wishes she was eighteen again so she can relive her glory days and make different life choices going forward. Accidentally running into her childhood best friend, Fiona (played as an adult by Tove Edfeldt and as a teen by Miriam Ingrid), doesn’t help matters. Fiona is now a famous and successful singer which only amplifies Amelia’s feelings of personal failure.

She gets snapped out of her funk in a very dramatic way when she is hit by a truck and knocked unconscious in an accident that would surely have killed anyone else. Amelia wakes up in her childhood bedroom with her loving and charming parents (Per Fritzell and Vanna Rosenberg) singing the Swedish version of “Happy Birthday” and putting a paper crown on her head. She goes through her day in a state of very mixed emotions, chiefly disbelief, culminating what she had always remembered as her epic eighteenth birthday party. The party consists of teens drinking heavily, throwing up, dancing, laughing, making out, and being mean to each other.

When Amelia wakes up again the next morning to her parents coming into her room singing, she begins to realize that she’s caught in a time loop of some kind. She tells Fiona what’s happening and Fiona invites her to watch the movie Groundhog Day. Amelia is then convinced that if she becomes a better person, she can break out of the loop, like Bill Murray’s character did in Groundhog Day. She spends the day trying to do everything good and right, but she still wakes to the sight of her parents and their earnest good wishes.

Almost all of the teens in One More Time are selfish, rude, superficial, and mean, including Amelia—at first. As she goes through the many variations of her eighteenth birthday, she does learn and grow and become a better person. And she does break out of the loop, but I’ll let you find out how for yourself.

I didn’t find this movie particularly funny or romantic, despite its categorization as “romantic comedy”. For me, the best thing about One More Time is its theme of friendship enduring despite years lost and despite human weakness.