Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes by Junta Yamaguchi


Tins of Droste Cacao (コパンのうら)

Browsing through Amazon Prime for something to watch last Sunday afternoon, I finally settled on this “science fiction movie set in Kyoto,” which looked promising. I mean, a time-travel film set in Japan’s ancient capital should be good, right?

It turned out that the only piece of Kyoto you’ll see in the film besides the seconds-long shot of a street at the beginning is the inside of a cafe, where this low-budget film was shot.

The Japanese title is ドロステのはてで僕ら (Dorosute no hate de bokura) and I had to look up what “dorosute” means. (“Droste,” I learned later, is a Dutch brand of cocoa from which Droste effect got its name.)

A letterboxd user described it as:

Tenet minus about $199,500,000, minus western actors, minus IMAX cameras (or Arri cameras, for that matter), plus more fun, plus lots of passion for cinema, and plus the makings of being the next “One Cut of the Dead” surprise crowdpleaser. Great little “time-sucker punch” romance.

Which is just as well, because I hated Tenet.

But the Droste film was not bad, although I got a nagging headache afterwards because of the many sequences of walking action shot with handheld camera.