River (2023)

Original title: Ribâ, nagarenaide yo

A small, traditional Japanese mountain inn situated right next to a river and its surroundings are suddenly trapped in a time loop. While the characters keep a continuous consciousness and remember everything that happened in earlier loops, the world around them and the position and state of their bodies are reset every two minutes. We experience this through the perspective of Mikoto (Riko Fujitani), a young woman working at the inn. The staff do their best to keep the peculiar situation calm as if keeping guests from losing it were just another part of the horrors of working in the service industry to be survived through politeness and gritting one’s teeth.

Obviously, the situation escalates, because juggling eccentric guests and private feelings isn’t easy even outside of a time loop.

Junta Yamaguchi follows up his lovely, charming time travel variation Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, with this lovely and charming time loop variation again focussed on two minutes, again scripted by Makoto Ueda (who also has form in other time travel adjacent media).

In the beginning the film charms through the simple and focussed manner in which it treats its basic plot, the surehanded escalation of events and loss of nerves of its characters. Once the point is reached where it appears proceedings are just one step ahead of turning into outright horror or splatter, Yamaguchi slows it down simply by letting Mikoto turn in a different direction after a loop has reset, stepping into a quieter, more quietly emotional part of the plot, until we get a humorous action-ish finale.

Visually, Yamaguchi makes clever use of repeating camera angles and set-ups. We always start a loop on the same shot of Mikoto standing by the river, and follow her into the inn with the same shot from behind, to only then encounter the newest escalation with changes to the staging and framing of what follows. The film diverges from this very purposefully at certain points to signal larger changes in the emotional quality of what’s happening and the development of the plot. This does feed into – represents, really -  the film’s main thematic argument – the human need for change even in the sort of quiet and calm one might want to stay in forever. Which could sound a bit like something out of an astrology book or the worst kind of pop psychology, but is here, embedded in quirky shenanigans, time travel and time loop tropes, and some sweet quiet moments, perfectly convincing.