Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is a time travel yarn that played at the Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival. It has finally become available on Tubi.

If you found a TV that could let you see two minutes into the future, how would you use it to impress your friends and make a quick buck in the process? Small café owner Kato discovers that some kind of temporal wormhole has inexplicably opened between the TV in his café and the TV in his bedroom. Future Kato explains to present Kato that his lost guitar pick is under the rug, that he is seeing himself two minutes into the future, and if he doesn’t want to create a time paradox then he should hurry downstairs and tell past Kato the exact same thing. Billing itself as a one-take time travel sci-fi comedy, Junta Yamaguchi’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is a no-budget, high-stakes adventure that gets everything it can out of its ultra-smart concept.

Kato’s two-minute Time TV is a time travel conundrum that quickly becomes an object of madness for him and his friends. The story immediately becomes self-propelled as small, seemingly insignificant choices snowball into bigger and bigger events down the road. We can see what will happen, but the interesting thing as a viewer is in finding out how and why it happens at the same time Kato and his friends do. Just thinking about writing the script is enough to turn anyone’s brain into a pretzel, but for the most part Beyond the Infinite is a relatively logical watch. I wouldn’t blame anyone that feels the need to consult timeline breakdowns afterwards though.

Edited to appear as if it is happening in real-time, there are actually multiple invisible cuts hidden throughout the film. Despite not being a true one-take, the easiest comparison to make is to Shinichiro Ueda’s zombie flick One Cut of the Dead. Beyond sharing a Japanese origin, One Cut feels like Beyond the Infinite’s spiritual predecessor in terms of the ingenious microbudget filmmaking spirit they both share. The acting in both is nothing to be blown away by. Instead, they are completely buoyed by the quirky hijinks and mind-boggling concepts behind them. Half of the enjoyment is from imagining the preparation by both cast and crew to pull off the two-minute time loop. Indeed, the film’s credits show a behind-the-scenes look at some of the filming in action. Turns out you don’t need money to make a kick-ass movie. All you need is two rooms, an iPhone, a staircase, and a script person on hand presumably with a couple hundred pages of notes to keep everything on track.

With a runtime barely over an hour, you thankfully don’t need a degree in theoretical physics to understand Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes. Much like its two-minute time loop it is short, sweet, and packed with seemingly infinite possibilities. As entertaining as it was to watch the shenanigans unfold, it was made even better knowing that the filmmakers had just as much fun putting it on screen.

Tags: beyond the infinite two minutes, one take movies, review, saskatoon fantastic film festival

About the Author

Blake Morrow is an aspiring screenwriter, accomplished movie junkie, and proud Saskatchewanian. Other serious interests include cats, the public library, and Connor McDavid.