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Stars: Aki Asakura, Kazunari Tosa, Riko Fujitani, Gota Ishida, Masashi Suwa, Yoshifumi Sakai | Written by Makoto Ueda | Directed by Junat Yamaguchi

A couple of years ago One Cut of the Dead blew everyone away with it’s originality, cleverness and charm, creating a whole new kind of zombie movie. Even though Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes does not feature the same filmmakers, it is still rightly being hailed as a worthy successor to the genre film.

It’s easy to see why after only a few minutes of the movie as we jump straight into the time travel story. It may sound a little more complicated than it actually is as a café owner discovers his PC monitor shows what will happen two minutes into the future, while a screen downstairs in the café shows the past of two minutes ago. His friends decide to place the two screens opposite...

Stars: Aki Asakura, Kazunari Tosa, Riko Fujitani, Gota Ishida, Masashi Suwa, Yoshifumi Sakai | Written by Makoto Ueda | Directed by Junat Yamaguchi

A couple of years ago at Frightfest, One Cut of the Dead blew everyone away with it’s originality, cleverness and charm, creating a whole new kind of zombie movie. Even though Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes does not feature the same filmmakers, it is still rightly being hailed as a worthy successor to the genre film.

It’s easy to see why after only a few minutes of the movie as we jump straight into the time travel story. It may sound a little more complicated than it actually is as a café owner discovers his PC monitor shows what will happen two minutes into the future, while a screen downstairs in the café shows the past of two minutes ago. His friends decide to place the two...

The logistics behind Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes are mind-boggling to fathom; time-travel stories are often confusing enough when they aren’t filmed as a one-shot. The Europe Kikaku theatrical troupe embracing that extra challenge is, accordingly, wild. Group director Makoto Ueda admits he wouldn’t have written the script that way if he didn’t already trust his actors and know they could handle the experiment. Not that having them at his disposal necessarily made his and director Junta Yamaguchi’s jobs any easier. To be able to craft this particular adventure through time and space into a seamless seventy-minute progression, they would still need to break everything into two-minute increments to ensure it all happened as it already had.

Why? Because that’s the conceit. Kato (Kazunari Tosa) doesn’t know how it’s possible, but the Apple computer in his second-floor apartment has somehow connected with the...