Again Again world première at the Seattle International Film Festival 2026
“I’ve tried everything,” insists trans Agatha (Mia Moore Marchant) to her girlfriend Tessa (Aria Taylor) at the beginning of Again Again. Lying by her side on the bed, Tessa is holding Agatha’s hand, on which ‘2863’ has been written in black ink. That is the number of times that Agatha has experienced this one single day, at least since she started keeping a record – nearly eight long years caught in an infernal loop, Groundhog Day-style.
To Tessa, this is just one day like any other, albeit the day after she jilted her fiancé Jason (Jon Meggison) at the altar and ran off with her lover Agatha in a Recreation Vehicle intended for the newlyweds’ honeymoon. To Tessa, Aberdeen, Washington is just a city that they are passing through briefly on their way to a new life together in Los Angeles, whereas to Agatha, it is a hellhole in which she has become trapped. During this time Agatha has had to explain and reexplain her iterative existence to the otherwise oblivious Tessa. She has heard – repeatedly – every intimate story that Tessa has felt the need to confess, and has been through every argument that a couple could possibly have. She has had to endure Tessa rehearsing a song on her guitar, badly and ad nauseam, without ever improving – and has, in the meantime, herself become proficient on the guitar, while getting to know inside out the other LGBTQ+ folk living in the vicinity, like the record store owner Naomi (Abigail Thorn) and ‘dykey’ car wrecker Jack (Alexa Feeney).
Where Again Again – which Aberdeen native Marchant also wrote and co-directed with Heather Ballish – differs from Harold Ramis’ 1993 time-loop classic is in its queer themes, and in the fact that it is less focused on this one repeating day than on the morning after. For near the beginning of the film, Agatha suddenly emerges into a tomorrow she never thought possible, and finds herself surprisingly daunted by the prospect of facing a new life with Tessa, no longer on repeat, where the unexpected and the unscripted can once more occur. For Agatha feels that she is years ahead of Tessa in their relationship, and may even, over the course of that one seemingly endless day, have outgrown her, and she struggles to cope with the imbalance between them. And there is another anxiety: for as Agatha begins to wonder if Tessa might have been the source of the loop, and might be able to cause more of them, the fear of getting trapped again kicks in. So Agatha will, over the course of this day, fuck, fight and flee, even as Tessa tries to meet her halfway.
Ultimately Again Again is a romantic drama, queered as much by its genre touches as by its trans and bisexual themes. Agatha and Tessa have known each other for 15 years (although, as Agatha points out, 25 for her), and their first kiss, as a flashback reveals, was back when Agatha was still an awkward adolescent boy. Agatha has of course since transitioned, but is caught in the idea that where she has changed, Tessa is always playing catch-up. As this couple banter, bicker and sometimes break up, only continuously to reset to the fundamentals of their (literally) fugitive relationship, Agatha’s sense that she and Tessa are victims of bad timing, always running on different tracks, finds vivid expression in the film’s sci-fi premise. For here the recurring present always leaves Agatha close to, but alienated from, her lover, while the very idea of moving on into an unknown future – together or apart – is a source of fear as much as desire. “At least”, Agatha tells Tessa, “I was safe in the loop.”
Meanwhile Tessa, at first a mere prop in Agatha’s narcissistic, even solipsistic limbo, gradually comes forward as an autonomous agent with thoughts and feelings of her own which Agatha, for all her close, continuous proximity, has not always seen. Agatha may not realise it, but these two women are in fact growing together, revising the past and mending any damage that their relationship incurs. “Some things can’t be fixed,” Agatha will tell Tessa – but as they both explore the complex interplay of continuity and change which characterises any transformation or indeed transition, they will find that their love for each other is the one constant that shields them from the ills of the outside world.
Even if you decide to view the more unworldly events in Again Again as a bad trip (“Why do I have to be so fucking high all the time?”, Agatha asks at one point), or as a mid-accident, Owl Creek Bridge– or Carnival of Souls-style death dream, Agatha and Tessa’s commitment to each other, though shaken, holds true. That is what makes this (stalled) road movie also a romance: for so long as these two can remain fellow passengers on the same journey and with a basic shared trajectory, even the most irrational of obstacles can eventually be overcome by eros. It is a mannered debut feature, personal yet paradoxical, and well worth watching for those who think they have tried everything. You might even want a repeat viewing…
strap: Trapped in transit: in Mia Moore Marchant & Heather Ballish’s sci-fi romance, a queer woman emerges lost and confused from a time loop
© Anton Bitel
