Plot synopsis
Weatherman, Phil is filming a weather report on location. He wakes up the following morning in his hotel room to find the same day is starting over again. This then continues to happen day after day.
Each day, he gains cumulative memories and learns by his mistakes, so can change the outcome of each day. At one point, he realises he is doomed to spend the rest of his life trapped in this time loop. So, he tries several times to escape by committing suicide, but each morning his alarm wakes him, and it is always Groundhog Day.
He changes his actions each day until he finally gets it right. Then the following morning, he wakes to find he has progressed to the next day thus escaping the time loop.
My comments
The same external events keep happening day after day, but Phil is able to change the way he reacts to them and make different decisions about the way he is going to behave. Wherever he ends up, in his bed, in jail or even dead, as soon as the clock reaches 6 am the following morning, the day always resets itself to start of Groundhog Day.
Phil is the only one who can remember that time has gone back. This continues until finally he makes a significant enough change to move out of the loop and into his future. This time loop is not a causal loop, as the past actions he makes the following day do not cause his present situation to form.
Summary of time travel
The past is open because each time Phil is thrown back in time, he changes his behaviour, which creates a new diverging timeline replacing the original one. This keeps happening until he wakes up the following day to find himself on a timeline that has a future beyond Groundhog Day. So, it seems the future is closed, as there appears to be only one timeline with a future. Note that there were more different diverging timelines than shown in the diagram below:
Category of time travel
Psychological: waking up in another time or place.
Model of time
Open past, closed future with a diverging timeline.
