Imagine what life would be like in the absence of time. If you forever lived in the same moment and never had to worry about anything else coming your way except what you already knew what was coming, would you be able to live in the moment forever, or would the moment lose any sort of meaning?
In the Amazon Prime original, The Map of Perfect Tiny Things (2021), a teenage art nerd named Mark—portrayed by Kyle Allen—finds himself in a time loop where he keeps living the same day over and over again. Mark meets a girl named Margaret—Kathryn Newton—who is stuck in the same loop. Be warned: this review does reveal some spoilers about the movie.
While living his lonely existence in the eternal day, Mark has his sights set on a girl named Phoebe—Anna Mikami—whom he saves from getting hit by a beach ball at the pool every repeated day. One day, a different girl catches the beach ball before it hits Phoebe. Mark is overcome with obsession and spends every waking moment of the next several “days” trying to find this girl, who we learn is named Margaret. When he finally finds her, he asks her if she is going through the same temporal anomaly that he is. She says yes.
Mark and Margaret begin to spend more “time” together and get to know each other just a little bit better, in what I would consider an epic tale of love and loss. The more we learn about the characters, the more we fall in love with them. Mark tells Margaret about how he has been trying to be the hero of everyone’s story, and we learn that all Mark wants to be is a good guy. While Margaret is less willing to reveal aspects of herself to Mark, we come to learn that she has a lot of personality as well, along with a lot of emotional issues she is dealing with under the surface
While together, they show each other perfect little moments that they had discovered during their “time” in the loop. From this, they decide that they want to find all the perfect little things that occur in their town on that day. We are blessed with an adorable montage of them coming across perfect little things that happen throughout the day within their own hometown. The more perfect little things that they find, the closer our two main characters get and the more you want them to get together.
The movie as a whole was a beautiful mix of adventure, romance and drama. When seeing all the perfect little things they found, I felt inspired to go out and find perfect little things out in our world, especially in a time where there are so many imperfect things. In addition, the characters had so much chemistry and did adorable things together, like land on the moon or ride a bike through the school halls, that would make anybody envious of the relationship they had, even after not knowing each other for that long. Finally, the drama and mystery revolving around where Margaret went every night at 6 p.m. left me curious as to what she was doing and surprised when we found out.
The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is an amazing movie that taught me about the value of time and how, without it, our lives would have no meaning and neither love nor loss would be worth anything.