Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (Japan, 2020)

[Edgy MD]

A café owner retires to his apartment upstairs from his establishment. He sits down to practice guitar for a gig he has later that evening, but when he can't find his pick, his face appears on his computer/tv monitor, speaking from the café, telling him that he is himself two minutes in the future, and to come back downstairs, so he can tell himself where his pick is.



Hy. Jinx. Ensue.



[fimg=500]https://images.bonanzastatic.com/afu/images/5ef9/5608/4261_10971250718/W_1981_.jpg[/fimg]

[Edgy MD]

I never gave a fuller account of this but this was a surprisingly good find. Apparently it's part of a rising genre of Japanese filmmaking that attempts to edit films like Hitchcock in Rope, telling the story in real time and making it look like it's all one shot. These are generally done on the cheap but by ambitious young filmmakers, but this one came out right as COVID was shutting everything down, so it was one of the few films in distribution at the time and really caught on.



We were on a roll with seeing a lot of time-loop movies at the time but this one kind of stood out in it's insane premise, and seeing the same scene play out from different perspectives four, eight, and 12 minutes apart can create an interesting type of tension as characters try to elude fates they are warned about by increasingly frenetic future versions of themselves.



There's a little rom-com, a little stupid-young-adults-get-mixed-up-with-the-mafia, more than a little brain-breaking time concepts, and a lot of handheld cameras. Thumbs up.