‘The Greatest Hits’ Tells the Most Original Time Travel Story in Years

At this point, time travel movies are about as commonplace as reality dating shows. They’re everywhere, and that ubiquity has almost entirely diluted their initial novelty. How can you make something truly different than what another person made before when the concept has been milked dry? The answer: You can’t. The only remaining option is to construct it with more integrity than most do. Only then can you make something that doesn’t feel like a carbon copy, yanked from an assembly line.

Writer-director Ned Benson’s latest film, The Greatest Hits—which premiered at SXSW March 14 and will be released in a limited theatrical window April 5 before landing on Hulu April 12—is the rare time travel movie that doesn’t feel like it’s arrived fresh from the factory. It barely feels like part of that genre at all, which is largely why Benson’s first film since 2014 avoids most of the snares that have debilitated other, superficially similar works. Looping through spacetime is merely a supplementary plot point to a story that’s really about how easily grief can be triggered, and why it can sometimes feel so good to sit in that cloud of painful sorrow for just a little longer. Benson’s film is a crafty yet subtle inversion of a stale genre. It moves the viewer and gets out while it’s ahead, aiming for maximum emotional impact over any flashy, absurd striving.

While The Greatest Hits is certainly not at the level of something like, say, Arrival when it comes to the ingeniousness of its plotting, it has a stirring scope that feels similar to Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 masterpiece. Think of this film as Arrival for the caffeine-dependent Coachella crowd; if that doesn’t pique your interest, I’m not sure what will. The movie finds Harriet (Lucy Boynton), a young music producer-turned-librarian, fiddling through her rows of vinyl records, looking for the next one to throw onto her turntable. Some are marked with slips that say “TESTED,” while a timeline of dates sits drawn on her wall, with sticky notes of scrawled-out messages taped up below each year.

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