Fantasia 2021: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It, King Knight | Festivals & Awards

Time travel movies have a history of bringing out some of the most inspired low-fi filmmaking, and “Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes” is the latest example. It’s one of the most clever time travel movies in years, and it was created with an iPhone, a spare cast, a handful of Apple TVs, and a slick editing strategy that makes it all look like it takes place in one shot. It’s so wild, and very telling of this movie’s brilliance, that there’s so much intricate blocking and camera movement from debut director Junta Yamaguchi, and yet you’re still caught up in the narrative momentum more than anything else. 

The inventive script by Makoto Ueda presents its idea of time travel with a thick air of amazement, and curiosity. At the peak of its 71-minute runtime, it establishes how a TV inside Kato’s apartment can see two minutes into the future. He can talk to himself, and his future self is able to tell him where his guitar pick is. Then Kato (Kazunari Tosa) goes down to the cafe below his apartment, and sees the interaction with his self from two minutes in the past, and tells past Kato about the guitar pick. The script builds from this idea with timelines inside timelines, as new characters are brought into the fold. They are amazed by the idea of being able to talk to themselves two minutes in the past, but are also not wanting to break what their future selves did. Yamaguchi’s film gets trippy in a special lo-fi way when one of Kato’s friends, Ozawa, has the idea of getting the TVs to mirror each other, which creates reflections of two, four, six, and many more minutes in the future. 

“Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes” faces the challenges of any high-concept movie, and the dialogue can be full of puzzles that its confident storytelling helps make sense of, like “I got a message from the future’s future’s future’s future!” That’s where the non-demanding tone of the movie seems to pay off, as it then incorporates ideas of predestination, free will, and whether you’d want to know what will happen next. The script doesn’t get too emotional with these ideas, but it’s successful at eventually raising the danger of it all, especially when knife-wielding wannabe gangsters enter the cafe, unaware about the paradox they are stepping into. Yamaguchi keeps the precise nature playful, and the excitement of this amazing discovery, and learning about its rules, carries the film—I imagine it would be equally effective in a second viewing, as well.