Fantasia Festival 2021 Film Review: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes
The brilliant, loopy Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is best of the fest
Junta Yamaguchi’s brilliantly clever Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is my favorite film of Fantasia 2021 so far. A high-concept, single-take masterwork that melds small stakes sci-fi with lighthearted sweetness, it spins intricate gears inside a deceptively simple framework. Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes pushes lo-fi, low-budget filmmaking to its absolute limit. Minor spoilers ahead…
It’s no coincidence that the promotional material for Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes features a glowing quote from Shinichiro Ueda, architect of the 2018 zombie comedy, One Cut of the Dead. Calling Junta Yamaguchi’s directorial debut “a masterpiece of filmmaking packed with joy,” Ueda’s words could easily apply to his own one-take wonder from two years ago. Both films are steeped in an infectious love for cinema and an intricate understanding of moviemaking, and both elevate the single-take conceit above its typical gimmickry. At a lean 70 minutes, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is zero percent fat, but within its abbreviated runtime, it conveys fully-formed characters careening through a gauntlet of sub-genres - there’s romance, there’s comedy, and there’s obviously sci-fi.
The zany complications of Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes arise from its utter simplicity. Frazzled coffee house owner Kato (Kazunari Tosa) closes up shop, leaving his employee Aya (Riko Fujinati) to tidy up. Shambling to his tiny apartment upstairs from his café, he makes a startling connection with someone on his computer monitor: himself, two minutes in the future. His future self tells him where to find his lost guitar pick, and before he knows it, Kato finds himself closing a predestination loop, making his way downstairs just in time to tell himself the same thing he heard just two minutes ago. It’s an ingenious device because it’s so intimate in scope: What can you really even do with a two-minute glimpse into the future? There are no get-rich-quick schemes here, no shortcuts to fame or fortune.
“…Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is zero percent fat, but within its abbreviated runtime, it conveys fully-formed characters careening through a gauntlet of sub-genres…”
Throughout the entirety of Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, its narrative stays firmly entrenched within these two quantum-ly entangled monitors, but things become much more complicated when more colorful characters are let in on this little anomaly. Before long, Kato’s friend Komiya (Gota Ishida) - and another buddy - are roped into the time shenanigans, not to mention Kato’s long-simmering crush (Aki Asakura), who works in the barbershop next door. When the gang figures out a brilliant way to extrapolate the window beyond its original two minutes, things really start opening up.
On the technical side, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is nothing short of a marvel. Shot in a single take while considering a dizzying nesting doll structure of parallel timelines, it boggles the mind how many outlines, rehearsals, and storyboards it must have taken to plan everything out. Yamaguchi and screenwriter Makoto Ueda have crafted a unique reverse puzzle box that only gets more impressive the more you ponder it. But even as a wild, mind-bending ride, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes never loses sight of its characters or the human element. Early on in the film, the group becomes increasingly anxious about creating paradoxes, so they start going - literally - through the motions, recreating what the future has shown them instead of exercising their free will. Using this ingenious sci-fi premise, Yamaguchi paints a sobering portrait of the current human condition, a powerful commentary on how we fret about the future while we’re weighed down by the past, and how we’re obsessed with the screens in front of our faces rather than making genuine connections.
