In this time-travel comedy, a cafe owner and his friends discover a portal that allows them to see two minutes into the future.
More goofy than gripping, Junta Yamaguchi’s sci-fi farce, “Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes,” is a time-travel tale dotted with philosophical musings and romantic expectations. Yet however cleverly constructed and enthusiastically executed, this debut feature — shot on an iPhone in a single location — rarely surmounts the twistiness of its premise and the repetitiveness of its setups.
After closing his cafe for the day and retiring to his flat upstairs, Kato (Kazunari Tosa) is stunned to see himself on his television screen, apparently speaking from the linked monitor in the cafe — and from two minutes in the future. Kato and his delighted cohort waste no time in exploiting this marvel, racing up and down stairs and backward and forward in time to interrogate their near-future selves. And when fun experiments with lottery scratch cards have been exhausted, the group’s temporal tinkerings become infinitely more complex and consequential.
While there is much to admire in this scrappy, micro-budgeted debut feature, its sci-fi shenanigans are too convoluted and its visuals too claustrophobic to sustain interest. Yamaguchi’s skillful editing (he also acted as cinematographer) makes the tumbling momentum of Makoto Ueda’s script appear seamless, and the young, mostly theater-based actors are charmingly eager. Yet the movie’s darkest and most interesting insight is addressed only glancingly as Kato and his friends, with growing unease, realize that their foreknowledge is programming their present behavior.
That awareness of the unwelcome implications of seeing one’s future is soon subsumed by the movie’s more preposterous concerns, including the arrival of the time-travel police with memory-wiping powder. Bemused viewers, however, may feel they’ve been sniffing that all along.
Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes
Not rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
