The story kicks off with a mysterious clock being shipped to the Diehl residence. Without much pause, it’s thrown into the basement to rot away. Taylor (Easton Rocket Sweda), a mute boy who speaks through various AI voices on his iPad, fixes the clock and discovers he can turn back time just by changing the hour hand. At the same time, his parents (Greg Kinnear, “Phil” and Isla Fisher, “Blithe Spirit”) have warned the kids of an important meeting that will be happening later that night, everyone knows it’s a talk about a trial separation for the two of them. Taylor, alongside his two other siblings (Shay Rudolph, “I Wish You All the Best” and Mason Shea Joyce, “Hotel Artemis”), devises a plan to bring their family back together.

The familiar “Groundhog Day” trope is far from new, but it works best when it’s combined with new genres — movies like “Timecrimes,” or “Palm Springs” are great examples. The Present does a good job of combining comedy and romance into this looping day — we not only see the same day from many different angles, but also from many different perspectives in the family.

The problems with this film arise when the focus is placed on the adult relationships, specifically the core relationship with Greg Kinnear and Isla Fisher’s characters. Their emotions and motives are so volatile towards one another that it is amazing that the relationship has even lasted as long as it has. It feels like one slight misstep and the marriage is over, no matter the interjections. While there are some definite sweet moments between the couple, I can recall one where Kinnear’s character reluctantly gets a makeover and shows up to therapy looking as dashing as ever, it never breaks into the level of maturity we should expect from these role types. Despite commanding around the kids, the adults often act just as childlike as their younger counterparts, creating eye-rolls for much of the 86-minute runtime.

It’s a good thing then that a majority of the screen time is given to the kids in the family who abuse their time travel powers in many fun and exciting ways. Many scenes are shown multiple times from multiple angles giving the audiences that “Ah-ha!” moment time and time again as we watch the kids scheme up a master plan to bring their parents back together. There is an excellent montage sequence late in the film that I wish all time-shift movies had. The kids try everything under the sun to get the parents together whether it’s manipulating the stock market to one of them even faking their own death. Great stuff.

For a majority of The Present, the kids are tweaking and mastering this single grand plan until nothing could possibly go wrong, oddly though this plan is abandoned late in the third act and rather we get a generic and head-scratching ending to it all. Despite the lackluster conclusion, the movie features enough quaint jokes and silly time travel hi-jinks that it will definitely be fun for a whole family viewing.

The film, Diana’s Wedding, is built on contrast, juxtaposing the life of a regular Norwegian family with that of Diana’s. Liv (Marie Blokhus, “Forgotten Christmas”) and Terje (Pål Sverre Hagen, “Kon-Tiki”) wed on the same day as Charles and Diana, the former’s simple wedding a major contrast to the lavish royal wedding we all got to see on TV. Married life is filled with ups and downs for the pair. All the lovely words and high spirits of the wedding transform to extreme moments of tension when their daughter Diana is born. But director Charlotte Blom also shows us the tender and sweet moments, like Terje tidying up the outside area of their house after Liv makes a comment about it, or Liv offering to teach him how to swim when she finds out that he can’t.

At the same time, these sweet moments spiral to other moments of conflict later on, which just feels true to married life. An act of kindness now may become ammunition later on. Liv and Terje’s neighbors Unni (Jannike Kruse, “Psychobitch”) and Olav (Olav Waastad) have it worse — their marriage is clearly in dire straits, and the pair are just existing in status quo. Unni feels that as a woman she needs to suck it up and bear her husband’s mistreatment of her, but much like the Princess of Wales herself, she eventually learns that you need to prioritize yourself if you want a happy life.

There is a sense of pathos here for the children of these couples. These fights between Liv and Terje occur in full view of their children Diana and Cato. Diana, who is the older child, is clearly more affected by their perpetual disagreements, especially since she is privy to the secrets that Terje keeps from Liv. Cato (John Emil Jørgensrud) grows up to be more well-adjusted, so it’s apparent that Liv and Terje managed to figure out their coupledom as they got older, and because Diana (Ine Marie Wilmann, “Sonja: The White Swan”) escaped them as quickly as she could, all she remembers is the constant fighting.

It is certainly reminiscent of children who fear their own married lives when they get older, terrified of replicating their parents’ failures. Sometimes it’s hard to see the good stuff when the bad stuff has greater impact. The tender moments are quieter, out of sight, while the fights are loud and visceral. At the end of the day, married life, or just life in general, is never going to be as smooth-sailing or as picturesque as one’s wedding day. There are going to be trying moments, and even moments where you wonder if you need to walk away — holding onto the love that you and your partner share will get you to the next day, and the day after that.

Blom’s Diana’s Wedding does really well in communicating the authenticity of married life, though it can be a bit much at times to see conflict after conflict play out on screen. I understand the intention, I just wished we got more of a balance, even if real life doesn’t really work that way.

Yes Day is filled with sloppily-written childish humor that’s both painstakingly cringe-worthy and mind-numbingly awkward to watch. There are only a few instances where the childish comedy works, which only comes through Arturo Castro’s (“Snatched”) hilarious supporting role as Officer Jones, a clueless (but incredibly innocent) police officer. The comedic timing involving him and Jennifer Garner is pitch-perfect and more hilarious than anything else that comes before or after his extended cameo. Most of the humor found in Yes Day is full of outdated “trends” of the early-2010s, such as twerking and the Gummy Bear song, which even early tweens/teens could find potentially dull and “past date.” The physical humor also feels inherently obsolete, taking direct inspiration from bad children’s slapstick comedies, most notably Fred Savage’s “Daddy Day Camp.” One sequence in particular, where the Torres family take part in a game of “Kablooey!” feels like it’s taken straight from that film, with all of the horribly-timed slapstick, aesthetic parodies (most notably, Wachowski’s “The Matrix”) and self-centered characters Savage’s film perpetuated.

Speaking of egotism, Yes Day is only filled with self-centered characters who only care about themselves and their own faux-problems. There is nothing remotely interesting regarding Garner, Ramírez, or Jenna Ortega’s (“Insidious: Chapter 2”) characters since they are bathed in their unimportant selfishness throughout the entire film. The film’s framing device is supposed to make the Torres family realize how important the role of a parent is and how being overprotective is a sign of love — yet none of the children characters, who put themselves in dangerously stupid situations because they think they must achieve “independence” as a teenager, deserve any form of sympathy from the audience. The film’s final “emotional” moment, where Allison sings The Four Tops’ Baby I Need Your Loving, at a music festival to find her daughter Katie (Ortega), who thought it was “cool” and “hip” to go at the festival with her friend and total strangers that she never met, falls completely flat on its face because director Miguel Arteta (who previously directed Garner in the chaotic family flick, “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”) and writer Justin Malen (“Father Figures”) gives no reason for the audience to sympathize with the characters, before this moment. They’re all extremely egocentric and only participate in “Yes Day” to fill some void they have in their self-important bubble.

Allison wants to prove to their children that she’s a “cool mom,” even though saying “no” to potentially dangerous stuff only makes her a good parent, Carlos wants to prove that he, too, can be “strict,” though what’s the fun in that? Katie wants to prove that she can be “independent” (spoiler: She realizes it was a bad idea) by going to the aforementioned festival, and son Nando (Julian Lerner, “Pottersville”) wants to showcase his “science” skills and throw a “sick” party (which was also a bad idea). There’s nothing in the film’s “Yes Day” that is achieved to prove how a closer, more flexible family builds a better relationship between the parents and the children — it’s all about “me, myself and I.” Because of this, Yes Day fails at not only being an entertaining riff on the “Yes!” comedy for families, but completely stumbles when it tries to present a message on family and parenting. The actors do an admirable job, sure, and the film’s cinematography does provide some visually intriguing moments, but it isn’t enough for me (or anyone really) to want to seek it out. You’re much better off watching “Yes Man” instead.

Employing layered editing, and creepy-sympathetic music (by Mini Mansions) recalling Angelo Badalamenti, we get a terrific, slow-burn opening, wherein 30-something Ryan (Chase Joliet, “It Comes at Night”) gets the news that his biological father, Frank (Tim Abell, who somehow isn’t Tom Berenger), has died in a surfing accident, and he’s left him his Californian home.

Ryan and his fiancée Isi (Sara Montez, “#WhenTodayEnds”) travel to the inherited house and find it’s beyond their wildest dreams, not to mention their usual means. Yet everyone, including the realtor Effy (an impactful cameo for Dale Dickey, “Hell or High Water”), seems to be nudging them toward selling. Even Frank is in on the act, posthumously imploring a quick sale via letter.

Slowly — impressively slowly for a modern chiller — Ryan and Isi get to know the locals. It seems there’s a dark history involving settlers “taking” the native girls for some malign purpose. Ryan is having disturbing dreams. His dad, drowned. His dad, slashing his own throat. And who are those guys strangling his mother?

Resentment grows between Ryan and Isi. Communication crumbles. Isi is pregnant and, reasonably enough, wishes for Ryan to show some sense of responsibility. But instead he’s retreating into himself. He was abandoned once, so he is pre-abandoning his own unborn child. Ryan is being pressured from the past (the ghosts of a violent history) and the future (parenthood) — and he’s sliding toward something terrible.

It’s kind of like “The Shining,” only from the perspective of Erik Erikson’s sixth psychosocial stage. And debutant writer-director Tyler Savage, who previously shared a set with Terrence Malick on “To the Wonder,” has remarkable, Kubrickian poise behind the camera. The film’s best scene involves Ryan’s sister and her partner paying a visit. Their dinner party is a consummate example of filmmaking control: A single take, with complex slow zooms and pans, capturing the swelling discomfort, and every subtlety of the performances.

The key problem of Inheritance, though, is a crucial imbalance in the narrative. The ostensible plot, about an initially happy couple moving into a creepy house, and the strain this has on their relationship, is simple to the point of cliché. The backstory, on the other hand, is overstuffed with characters and incidents from different timelines, and presented so vaguely and esoterically that it’s a challenge to grasp with any real certainty.

As a result, we are left clawing for clues as to what the film is really about. At a push one assumes Ryan is resistant to parenthood because of the palpable fear that he will simply be a vessel for some murderous family trait. But is this actually in the film, or am I digging for content because I’m seduced by the style?

Savage’s resistance to exposition is admirable, but the sparseness of the script puts the emphasis almost solely on the occasionally over-stylized visuals, whilst never being satisfyingly scary. It’s a film of build-ups and no money shots. A mystery this stately needs a killer reveal. Inheritance delivers one shock moment, sure, but its impact is softened by the hackneyed twist that goes along with it. (Speaking of hackneyed, the use of the sound of faintly moaning wind to trigger uneasiness is overused here).

The performances are fantastic, however. Joliet nails the bereft gaze of a man whose last opportunity to know his real father has passed: A lost little boy. Drew Powell (“Gotham” TV series) gets an enjoyably grotesque role as Ryan’s “cuz,” Del. But the best performance is Montez’s; and perhaps we could have used fewer lingering shots of Joliet gazing wistfully out to sea and spent more time with his increasingly frustrated fiancée, a woman whose strength doesn’t waver even as her brave face falls.

I wish I loved Inheritance, but I can only say I admire it. Its anxious atmosphere is impressive, and the filmmaking craft is exceptional — even more so when you consider this is a debut. But the storytelling is problematic. While I can see what it’s striving for, ambiguity really can look an awful lot like a plot tying itself in knots. But there’s easily enough here to suggest a truly special sophomore effort.