I’ve always defended my love of Hallmark movies — the Christmas trees, the meet-cutes, the small-town businesses struggling to avoid being taken over by people from the big city. But there’s no denying that they are of a type, shall we say, and many times, their precise pleasure is that you wouldn’t mistake them for anything else. Furthermore, even as Hallmark has expanded its vision with changes like introducing LGBTQ+ characters and stories now and then, their efforts to expand beyond Christmas into Hanukkah have sometimes felt a bit tentative.
Imagine my delight at finding Round and Round, a lovely new entry that’s a solid light romantic comedy that you wouldn’t be surprised to find somewhere else besides Hallmark, and that also embraces Hanukkah as its theme in a way that feels complete and thoughtful.
The structure is familiar: it’s a time-loop movie. Rachel (Vic Michaelis) goes to her parents’ Hanukkah party, where her grandmother tries to set her up with Zach (Bryan Greenberg), a handsome fellow who unfortunately bumped into her earlier in the day and destroyed the box of sufganiyot (jelly doughnuts) she was bringing to the party. But Rachel has a boyfriend, so she doesn’t take much of an interest, but when she wakes up the next morning … it’s the same morning all over again, the seventh night of Hanukkah. So now, like so many protagonists before her (Groundhog Day and Palm Springs both get explicit shout-outs in the dialogue), she’s trapped and needs to figure out how to break the loop so her life can continue.
As she continues in the loop, she decides to bring Zach in on her problem, and he — an adorable nerd who’s carrying around his D&D dice in a special box, and whose friends run a comic-book store — resolves to try to help, even though every day he has to be brought up to speed all over again.
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