Aahana Swrup
Netflix’s ‘One More Time,’ the directorial debut of Jonatan Etzler, is a Swedish romantic comedy film full of nostalgia for teenagehood in the early 2000s. The film stars Hedda Stiernstedt, Per Fritzell, and Miriam Ingrid, among others. It follows a recently turned 40, Amelia, whose life has only gone downhill since high school. Things take a drastic turn when she somehow wakes up on the morning of her 18th birthday. However, as she keeps reliving the same day over and over again, she finds herself desperately wanting to escape this aimless time loop. The film features classic high school dynamics, a dwindling friendship, and a didactic time loop scenario. If you’re curious to see what lessons Amelia learns from this situation and if she ever manages to break out of this spiral, here is everything you need to know about the ending of ‘One More Time.’
One More Time Plot Synopsis
On the day of her 40th birthday, Amelia impulsively quits her job and finds herself all alone at Arez’s bar, where she gets drunk. When a childhood friend, Fiona, visits the same bar to pick up pizzas for her own birthday party, Amelia drunkenly recalls her friendship with Fiona before the two drifted apart. When they were kids, Fiona and Amelia wrote down their deepest wishes and locked them inside a time capsule buried on a mountain. Amelia tells Arez that they never dug the time capsule back up on their 18th birthday like they intended to because they’d grown apart by then.
Tipsy as she is, Amelia goes to the mountain to get the time capsule. Inside the tin box, Amelia finds her own note that reads her wish of wanting to become cool and popular. However, when she takes Fiona’s wish out, a gust of wind carries it away before Amelia can read it. As she follows after the note, Amelia ends up in the middle of the road and promptly gets hit by a truck. Now, Amelia wakes up in her childhood bedroom with her much younger-looking parents singing their trademark birthday song for her.
Amelia’s confusion grows after Moa, her best friend from high school, comes to pick her up from home. After noticing things from her teenage years littered around, and newspapers from 2002, Amelia realizes she has time-traveled back to the day of her 18th birthday. At school, she reunites with her old boyfriend, Max, who is still as dreamy as ever to Amelia. Later the trio goes to the school auditorium for the talent show. When the last performer, Fiona, comes out to play a song on her guitar, all the students are disinterested and leave as soon as her performance starts. Afterward, during a presentation with Moa on Hinduism, Amelia comes to the conclusion that she has been given a new chance to enjoy the best years of her life to the fullest. Amelia sleeps with her boyfriend at her birthday party and thinks their relationship can work out this time. However, Max freaks out and dumps her after Amelia starts talking about a serious future together.
The next day Amelia wakes up to her parents singing her birthday song again. This time around, Amelia takes a different approach to the day. Nevertheless, she still ruins it by kissing Moa’s crush, Patrick Foreman, and damages her relationship with Moa and Max. On the third day, Amelia seeks out help from Fiona after her failed performance in the talent show. Fiona is surprised to see Amelia due to their estrangement the past few years but agrees to hear her out regardless. Amelia tells Fiona all about her time loop predicament, and Fiona references the 1993 American movie, ‘Groundhog Day.’ Later at Amelia’s birthday party, Amelia ditches her friends and leaves the party to visit Fiona’s mother’s video store. When she finds the store closed, she waits outside until Fiona shows up after nightfall.
Amelia and Fiona watch the movie together in the store at Fiona’s mother’s suggestion. After their movie ends, Amelia concludes that she needs to be a better person in order to break out of the cycle. Amelia apologizes to Fiona for dragging her along to watch the film with her and leaves. When the fourth day rolls around, Amelia does everything she can to be a better friend to Moa. Still, the cycle doesn’t end, and Amelia starts to lose all hope. Her teenage years stop feeling like the best time of her life when she realizes all her happiness is only superficial and that she’s more responsible for how things ended with Fiona than she had thought.
One More Time Ending: Does Amelia Break Out Of The Time Loop?
After Amelia’s time loop days take a defeatist turn, she stops caring about everything and just goes through every reiteration of her 18th birthday. On one such day, she overhears Moa and Max talking about her behind her back. They take insensitive jabs at her unpopularity when she was younger and calls her attention-seeking. At this point, Amelia is so exhausted by everything that she doesn’t even get mad at them and simply just leaves. She finds herself going back to Fiona and extends a hand of friendship. Fiona declines and tells Amelia that she abandoned her after middle school when she stopped caring about her.
Fiona’s words deeply affect Amelia. Therefore, she leaves the party and returns home to her parents. Back in her room, Amelia watches the tape her dad gave her as a birthday present. It’s a compilation of all her birthday parties up to her eighteenth one. Since Fiona and Amelia have the same birthday, the tape is full of clips of them from when they were closest. Amelia watches her younger self create the time capsule with Fiona and decides to dig it back up.
The next day at the talent show, when all the kids try to leave during Fiona’s performance, Amelia makes them sit back down so that Fiona can finish her song. Afterward, at her party, Amelia approaches Fiona and asks if she wants to dig up their old time capsule again. Fiona turns her offer down at once, leaving Amelia to go to the mountain on her own. Still, Fiona shows up at the last moment, right as Amelia is about to read her wish. Though Fiona tries to stop Amelia from reading it, she fails.
Inside her note is written, “I wish Amelia was in love with me.” After Amelia realizes Fiona has been in love with her all this time, Fiona makes a run for it, leaving Amelia behind. Amelia chases after her and gets hit by a truck again. This time when she wakes up, it’s 20 years in the future, where she had started.
Do Amelia and Fiona Get Back Together?
When Amelia wakes up in her time again, as a 40-year-old, she meets the truck driver who had accidentally hit her in the first place: her old boyfriend, Max. She makes Max drive her to Fiona’s birthday party and tells him about Fiona’s feelings for her. When she arrives at Fiona’s party, Amelia catches sight of Fiona with another woman and a baby. Jumping to the conclusion that Fiona has moved on and is with someone else now, Amelia flees from the party. However, not without first accidentally making a ruckus and attracting Fiona’s attention. Amelia decides to leave Fiona alone and not interfere in her happiness. She spends the rest of her day with her boss mending the bridge she burnt when she quit earlier in the day.
Later, she visits her parents on her way back to the time capsule mountain. As she’s sat alone on a bench overlooking the city, Fiona shows up and sits with her. Fiona tells her that she saw Amelia run away from her party and reveals that the woman she had seen her with is actually Fiona’s cousin. Amelia apologizes for everything that has happened between them since their childhoods. She tells Fiona that she has missed her and wants her back in her life. Fiona also shares the same sentiment, and the two decide to have a fresh start with each other. Though they don’t leave the movie explicitly dating one another, they’re both aware of the other’s feelings and likely end up in a romantic relationship after some time.
Read More: Where Was Netflix’s One More Time Filmed?
