Kato (Kazunari Tosa), owner of a small café, one evening discovers that the TV in his café and the computer in his apartment are two minutes out of sync, meaning from his apartment he can see what happens in the café two minutes in the future. Why that is he doesn't know, and he also doesn't know how to deal with this groundbreaking discovery - but he doesn't even have time to think about the latter, as when his waitress (Riko Fujitani) and his friends (Gota Ishida, Masashi Suwa, Yoshifumi Sakai) find out they pretty much take over, and soon put the computer and the TV opposite one another to effectively create an endless loop to look further than two minutes into the future. And against Kato's protests really they decide to exploit the future for their own enrichment - which is only to a degree hampered by the sheer fact that even with the two monitors across one another, there's only that far you can see into the future. But with the help of this time loop, they do find quite a sum of apparently masterless money, so they think they've figured out a short cut to wealth - cut short by some gangsters who lay claim on the money and to teach our heroes a lesson take Megumi (Aki Asakura), Kato's secret love who hasn't got anything to do with any of this, captive. And now it's up to Kato to free her, going up against two armed men with no fighting skills whatsoever, and only vague infos from the future as his defense ...

On a pure technical level, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is quite the achievement, as it was shot in one continuous take (and if there were edits they were well-hidden) while the story of the film is working on different time levels simultaneously - so the mere logistics of this are rather mind-boggling. But the real achievement of this movie is that it doesn't feel like the tour de force it undoubtedly was but it comes across as a well written piece of science fiction and a light-hearted (yet not light-weight) comedy at the same time, as a film that's in equal parts thoughtful and intelligent and just plain funny - and that despite (or maybe because of) the occasional leap of reason seems as thought through narratively as it was on the planning side of things, all resulting in great entertainment.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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