Name: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes
Director: Junta Yamaguchi
Genre: Science Fiction, Comedy
Released: 2020-06-05T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 70 min
Cast: Kazunari Tosa, Riko Fujitani, Gota Ishida, Masashi Suwa, Aki Asakura

The device could not be simpler to describe or harder to stage. A café owner climbs to the room above his shop and finds his own face already waiting on the monitor, saying words he has not yet spoken. The screen upstairs runs two minutes ahead of the television on the ground floor; the television, two minutes behind. Everything after that is worked out aloud, in the moment, by a handful of people standing between the two screens and arguing about what they are on the verge of doing.

What starts as a parlour trick hardens into an engineering problem. Aim the two screens at one another and the two-minute window folds into itself, a picture inside a picture inside a picture, each frame reaching a little further down the corridor of the near future. The friends christen the rig Time TV and put it to work, placing small bets, chasing a confession, bracing for a threat that will arrive, naturally, right on cue. The camera appears never to blink while they do it.

That unbroken look is the whole wager, and it explains the casting. The people on screen are not film stars but a working theatre company, Kyoto’s Europe Kikaku, with Kazunari Tosa anchoring the chaos as the café owner. The film asks of them exactly what a stage farce demands: hit the mark, take the handoff, pass the line along and keep the machinery of the plot turning without a visible seam. The comedy lives in that choreography rather than in the concept, and only performers used to holding a room in real time could sustain it.

Junta Yamaguchi directs, shoots and cuts the film himself, and it is his first feature. He works inside a small, stubborn Japanese tradition of the single-shot comedy — the lineage that produced the low-budget sensation about a doomed zombie shoot — where the gag is not merely what happens but the fact that the camera refuses to rescue anyone with an edit. The seams are hidden in plain sight, and part of the pleasure is watching for the joins and mostly failing to find them.

The title is a clue the film is proud of. A Droste image is one that contains a smaller copy of itself, which in turn contains a smaller copy, and so on inward — the trademark trick of an old cocoa tin whose label pictured a nun holding a tray that bore the same tin. That is exactly what the two facing screens produce, and exactly what the plot exploits: not a single leap forward but a receding tunnel of two-minute steps, each one requiring the characters to perform, on command, whatever their future selves have already been seen to do.

Read as text, the picture is a stage play that has stumbled onto science fiction. Makoto Ueda’s script explains its own rules the way farce always has, through characters telling one another what they are allowed to do and then breaking those terms at speed. The time-travel logic is dialogue, not spectacle: the ensemble reasons out each new complication in front of the audience, so the escalation feels argued rather than engineered. The single take is the dramaturgy, not a stunt bolted onto it.

Watching it, you feel the rehearsal room behind every scene. The blocking has the precision of a stage production that has run the same sequence until the timing is muscle memory, because that is more or less how it was built: a company that knows one another’s rhythms, working out a single unbroken movement rather than a shot list to be assembled later. What looks like technical bravado is really ensemble discipline, the actors carrying the film the way they would carry a live performance, with no safety net waiting in an edit suite.

It is worth naming what the film withholds. It has no real interest in the physics; the paradoxes are waved through with a shrug and a punchline, and anyone hoping for a clean theory of causation will leave unsatisfied. The emotional stakes stay deliberately modest — a crush, a little money, a mild scare — and once an audience has grasped the rules there is not a great deal underneath them. The conceit is the entire meal. A longer film would buckle under the same trick, and the brevity is a defence rather than an oversight.

Kazunari Tosa in Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, a one-take time-loop comedy — Kazunari Tosa in *Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes* (2020)

The credited principals include Riko Fujitani, Gota Ishida, Masashi Suwa and Aki Asakura alongside Tosa, most of them drawn from the same troupe that wrote and staged the material first. Europe Kikaku produced with the Tokyo art-house distributor Tollywood, on a budget small enough to fit the film’s homemade texture, much of it captured on a phone. It travelled the festival circuit widely — Fantasia in Montreal, Sitges, Brussels — before finding Korean audiences in Bucheon.

The Korean theatrical release opens on 19 August, six years after the film first surfaced in Japan, and it runs a lean seventy minutes. That afterlife is the point: a micro-budget experiment made by a theatre company almost as a dare has kept finding new rooms to play, and Korea is the latest to give it a proper screen. The two-minute window, it turns out, was always long enough.