Editor’s Note: Nick Johnston is here at home remotely covering the 2021 Fantastic Fest. Click here for our continuing coverage, and click here for our complete archive of past Fantastic Fests.
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Though they have plenty of talents, Fantastic Fest’s programming team has one that is often closer to my heart than their others: Their nearly-uncanny ability to track down the wildest low-fi Japanese comedies that you can watch and import them stateside, where perhaps they’ll find a new audience and go on to become a legend, like Shinichiro Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead did at the festival a few years ago. This year’s selection, Junta Yamaguchi’s sci-fi time-travel comedy Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, is nearly as sturdy as Ueda’s excellent meta-zombie flick was in its construction and is absolutely as charming as that was. It has wit, intelligence, and verve to spare, all of which is underwritten by fantastic writing and blocking, and perhaps cost a few thousand yen to make — like many modern low-fi productions, it was filmed on an iPhone, but it’s often very difficult to tell so. In short, it is everything one hopes for when they watch something truly independent, and not just masquerading as such for the cred.
Made in collaboration with Kyoto theater group Europe Kikau, Yamaguchi’s film concerns a particularly interesting 70-or-so minutes (and if you’re wondering, that’s the actual movie’s runtime as well, which is lovely) in the life of Kato (Kazunari Tosa), a cafe owner who plays in a local band part-time and has dreams of romancing his neighbor, Megumi (Aki Asakura). He’s a quiet guy who lives a ho-hum life, which makes it all the stranger that, on that fateful night, while practicing his guitar, he would receive a video message on his computer from himself two minutes in the future, sitting in front of the cafe’s television. Kato doesn’t believe it at first, but, sure enough, he goes downstairs and completes the causal loop, conversing with his past self in the exact same way that he had watched just a few minutes earlier. Some trial and error leads him to realize that, somehow, the TV in his cafe now has the ability to transmit messages from the future to the past. Sure, it seems pretty cool, but it also seems pretty useless — it’s only a measly two minutes — but when Kato’s friends show up, things begin to get crazy.
I can’t give away too much here, because I really want you to be able to see this film unspoiled (and with the reception that it’s getting I imagine you probably will get that chance to go in blind on a streaming service or, hopefully, theatrically one day), but Europe Kikau and Yamaguchi have figured out every single way that they can mess with their premise, and it is delightful to watch how these various situations unfold. It feels complicated at first blush, a fact you might have realized reading the above paragraph, but I assure you that it goes down as easily as a Brandy Alexander. There’s enthusiastic energy at the picture’s core, and it’s hard not to see it bleed out into an audience and win them over, even if they’re normally opposed to its kind of tricks, of which the single-shot construction may be for certain aesthetically stingy nerds. But I’d argue that the way it’s constructed and blocked is a feat in and of itself, and good lord how complicated it must have been: It’s a miracle that Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes works as well as it does. So, yes, it’s fantastic, and it’s wonderful that we’ve now got an intelligent low-budget time-travel movie to replace fucking Primer on everyone’s lists of the best sci-fi movies. No intelligence-flattering tricks here, just pure delight.