Time Enough at Last: The River Review

Do you find yourself turning on a time-loop film only to feel like you've seen it so many, many times before? Are you tired of watching a character learn to appreciate their daily lives after experiencing the unique perspective of living hundreds and thousands of minute repetitions upon a theme? Do you feel more and more as if these films do not, in fact, "got you, babe?" Enter Junta Yamaguchi's River, one of the big winners of Fantastic Fest 2023.

Yamaguchi's debut film, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, was a mind-bogglingly intricate time-travel movie in which a character's laptop transmitted messages two minutes in the future to a nearby television set. Shot in a pseudo-one-shot style, the film was at once undeniably impressive, ambitious, and somewhat exhausting to watch as every possible variation and complication was squeezed out of the central conceit. If they did not, in fact, actually go beyond the infinite two minutes, they went about as far as was possible in a micro-budget indie movie. But in River, Yamaguchi finds an emotional core to transform his ambitious two-minute-long gimmicks into a sincerely touching story of love, loss, regret, and professionalism.

The film follows Mikoto (Riko Fujitani), a waitress at a Japanese inn who, along with the other employees and their guests, discovers that time seems to be skipping back every two minutes. Guests have been eating the same meal two minutes at a time for 20 minutes. A bottle of sake can't be warmed up before time resets and is eternally lukewarm. A novelist finds that every sentence he writes is erased in each loop. Unlike most other time loop films, Mikoto is not the only character to recall previous loops—everyone in the surrounding area can feel time lurching back like a record player with a faulty needle.

This gives Yamaguchi space to push the expected boundaries of the time loop genre, showcasing what it might be like if dozens of people experienced the same thrill, boredom, and existential dread that those singular protagonists in Groundhog Day, Happy Death Day, Palm Springs, and others did. Like experiencing a natural disaster together, there are a range of responses and feelings, a search for leadership and answers, and an underlying compassion toward your fellow man even when the more gruesome time loop experiments begin.

It's a delicate needle to thread, balancing the comedy of a high concept with the emotional focus needed to make us really invest in Mikoto's arc, especially when we're only seeing her and the other characters for two minutes at a time. But Yamaguchi is able to do a lot with a little, letting the camera start with Mikoto on each time loop before slowly rising up, behind, and around her as it follows an unbroken tracking shot until the end of each loop. Unlike Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, it's not so distracting as to pull you out and wonder how they did each shot; instead, it feels utterly natural and in keeping with the film's themes and story. The longer each shot goes on, the more you feel the encroaching timer ticking down, the more aware you become that this loop is almost over. By the time more conventional editing choices creep in, you might not have even realized how deeply invested you've become in each loop's frantic pace. And while the scope of each loop and what the characters can accomplish in each iteration are limited, the scenery is so lush and the hotel so serene that the world feels open and expansive. The characters are trapped in time, but they don't feel trapped in space, which is an impressive trick to pull in a single-setting low budget feature.

But technical artistry without an emotional core might as well be an ant farm or a doll house. Thankfully, Fujitani's performance as Mikoto is full of such warmth and emotion bubbling under the surface that you become invested in her arc just as much as you might be impressed by the central conceit. Each loop begins with her gazing at the river outside the inn, and the cumulative experiences are immediately visible in Fujitani's expression as her eyes focus and she remembers where (and when) she is. Without spoiling anything, there is a very good reason why Mikoto might not be too fussed about time not moving forward, and that emotional blockage drives the tension of the film. As you'd expect, lessons are learned, characters evolve, et cetera, but River never feels predetermined or saccharine.

Ultimately, River is an impressive artistic leap forward from Yamaguchi, propelling his work beyond the, well, infinite two minute gimmick and into an assured, thoughtful place. It's incredibly exciting seeing such a unique, quirky creative voice growing and experimenting with his influences to build something entirely new… even if it might be a tough sell to get your friends to watch yet another time loop movie in 2023. Still, just because it feels familiar doesn't make it the same; sometimes deviations on a form lead to new possibilities.