Time loop films like Groundhog Day or Palm Springs typically have a requisite section of the looper having some fun, but in One More Shot, the Australian Y2K-set comedy, Minnie (Emily Browning) mostly just self-destructs. Though the film’s loop is an intimate party between best friends and former lovers, everything is pretty depressing, even the so-called jokes. Time-traveling tequila (well, really mezcal, as everyone points out, because there’s a worm in the bottle) sounds like a fun idea, but the film is really short on doling it out.
Good thing Browning is such an endlessly charming performer. She’s more or less the only person elevating the proceedings, which overall feels like a sanctimonious anti-alcohol campaign. Part of the reason Bill Murray’s foray into inadvertent time travel was so successful is because Harold Ramis’s film is, famously, complex in regard to its “meaning.” One More Shot feels so eager to wear its heart and its lessons on its sleeves that it doesn’t allow us to draw our own conclusions.
Too Much Nostalgia, Not Enough Substance
Minnie is, like past loop-film protagonists, a bit selfish. She’s been crashing on Flick and Max’s couch for too long (Anna McGahan and Contessa Treffone, respectively); she willingly “forgets” to bring ice to the party; she’s missed the birthday for Rodney and Pia’s newborn (Ashley Zukerman and Pallavi Sharda, respectively); and, she cheated on ex-fiancée Cam (Oliver Coleman) whom she runs into at the hospital, where she works as an anesthetist, right as his wife is giving birth.
She’s a mess, in other words, and it seems clear she is also an alcoholic. Though she doesn’t really feel like going to Rodney and Pia’s New Year’s Eve party, she is easily persuaded once she hears that ex-boyfriend Joe (Sean Keenan) has returned to Australia after some time away in New York. It’s a costume party, but Minnie wants to look hot — she’s determined to make Joe know what he’s missing — but everyone else is clad in a lot of 1990s signifiers. Rodney is dressed as Ace Ventura; Flick and Max are dressed as John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction; Joe is Kurt Cobain, while his new girlfriend, Jenny (Aisha Dee) is Courtney Love, and schlumpy creep C-Word (Hamish Michael) has come as George Clooney in E.R.
While tearing through her stuff to find the perfect sultry dress, she stumbles across an unopened bottle of mezcal that Flick gifted her ten years ago from a group trip to Mexico that Minnie wasn’t on. It looks like a mostly normal bottle of booze except that it’s called “The Devil’s Piss” and its wax top is in the shape of Lucifer. Before entering the party, she takes a swig to steel her nerves, thus planting the first bookend. After face-planting a window and breaking her nose, she takes another shot — and is transported to the moment she took the first one.
So, time travel works a bit differently than in past films of a similar ilk, which also means that if she chooses to, she can just let time proceed as normally by refusing to drink more. But Minnie convinces herself the time-traveling liquor is a sign she is supposed to break up Joe and Jenny and so begins a montage of desperate attempts to do so.
Because so much of the humor is dependent on how much of a fool Minnie can be, it exhausts itself pretty fast. The film has some of the requisite moments of figuring out just what is happening to herself, but skips past what should be an amusing section of indulging in hedonism. Minnie just isn’t having a good time, and so neither do we.
Most confusing is the film’s setting in 1999. The false threat of Y2K and the very real powers of the liquor feels like a hat on a hat, and the former is not particularly well served except as a dose of nostalgia. Otherwise, the time period barely justifies itself. It also feels cheap to have Minnie be so firmly in control of her destiny. She’s not forced to do this, not really, and so even when she learns some semblance of a lesson, she is still acting selfishly.
The film has some legitimate things to say about how substances can so often paper over mistakes but never to such a degree that those mistakes get erased; taking accountability is important, but it isn’t very fun to watch unless we’ve enjoyed the ride to get there.
One More Shot is available on VOD on December 12th, 2025.
- Release Date
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March 7, 2025
- Runtime
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95 Minutes
- Director
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Nicholas Clifford
- Writers
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Alice Foulcher, Gregory Erdstein
- Producers
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Nick Batzias, Virginia Whitwell
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Emily Browning
Minnie Vernon
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