If I hear Groundhog Day in the same sentence as a film or a drama, I am certain I am going to watch it. And so when I saw a review for this movie, I had to watch it. Yesterday With You is a good film: it ticked all the necessary boxes for it to be a convincing time travel story!

It was a story about childhood friends who meet as adults reconnect and fall in love. But life keeps throwing them lemons until an accident happens. With the help of magic birthday candles they try to fix what went wrong!

The first 10 min is a whole romcom movie: how they meet and fall in love and fight and make up and just love each other. The montage of significant scenes from a relationship is expertly done and we do not need more in order to know what is important here.

Then the tragedy strikes in the form of a white truck of doom (what else?). I was impressed by the creative use of the said truck: he actually pulled a scaffolding down on the victim. After this accident, the time travel groundhog day style starts using some candles. The cinematography changes a bit and from warm brownish tones we get a lot of greys and cold colours as the main characters rush around trying to change the future. There was an impressive scene with a car driving through a forest of huge grey pillars (must be a highway exchange) but it conveyed well the feelings of being lost and distraught.

The film was full of usual drama tropes: the already mentioned truck, stopping in the middle of the road to think, disapproving and abusive parents, quirky best friends. The actors, completely unknown to me, were really good and had decent chemistry.
This was actually a perfect format for this story avoiding thus all the downsides of a drama like length, filler stories and chinese propaganda (see Reset).