UnspoolCritical Time Loops in Screen Media
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Published 30 November 2026
About this book
The first book-length exploration of time loops in contemporary screen media
- Vital discussion of enormously prevalent but under-studied concept
- Chapters explore time loops across a wide array of screen media (film, television, videogames, installation art, apps)
- Extends discussion of time loops beyond narrative and into areas of ethical responsibility, racial discrimination, ecological thinking, queer theory and more
- Productively considers both popular, well-known texts (eg Russian Doll) and less well-known examples from a range of wider contexts
Time loops abound in recent screen media. From the torturous repeating birthdays of the TV series Russian Doll (2019–2022) and horror film Happy Death Day (2017), to the iterative runs of roguelike videogames like Returnal (2021), to the cyclical mediality of apps like TikTok, loops are used in a variety of ways by a variety of media in a variety of contexts.
Why are loops appearing with such prominence now and what cultural concerns do they express? In this edited collection, a range of scholars take a critical look at many different forms and manifestations of the time loop, from television shows about therapy to films about oppression to videogames about morality to the loops of media formats themselves.
Through this work, Unspool: Critical Time Loops in Screen Media shows the suppleness and significance of the time loop to our loopy times.
Table of contents
Introduction: On the Calculation of Loops
Nick Jones
Part I. Patterns of Oppression
1. Breaking the Cycle: The Promise of Heterosexuality in Time Loop Films
James Slattery
2. Resilient Emotion Work in Women-Centric Time Loop Television
Sarah Lahm
3. Patterns of Violence: Narrating the Repetitive Nature of Police Brutality in African American Cinema
Małgorzata Mączko
Part II. Trauma and Punishment
4. Gender, Repetition, and Solving Trauma in Russian Doll
Christina Wilkins
5. Helios Abandoned: The Traumatic Loops of Returnal
Nick Jones
6. Endless Punishment: Variations of Torment in the Sisyphean Loop
Larissa Barbosa Curi
Part III. Ethics
7. Agency and the Nonhuman in River: The Timeloop Hotel and The Endless
Wibke Schniedermann
8. Mythic Cycles of Ecological Collapse: Anthropocentrism and Determinism in Dark
Maria de Carli Ball
9. Morality at Play: What Loop Games Tell Us About Ourselves
Melanie Kreitler
Part IV. Medial Loops
10. The Perfect Loop: Towards a Theory of Suspension
Joseph Sannicandro
11. Acts of Witnessing: Staging Recursive Realities of Violence in Rimini Protokoll’s Situation Rooms
Melanie Wilmink
12. Time Loops, Real-Time Technologies, and the Trajectories of Optimisation
Tom Livingstone
13. Taking the Blade: Character, Identity, and Perception in Time Loop Games
Monica Evans and Rachel Kerr