Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (Dorosute no hate de bokura) is a 2020 Japanese science-fiction comedy film directed by Junta Yamaguchi and written by Makoto Ueda. It was filmed with No Budget and is presented as one unbroken shot.
Tropes:
- Chekhov's Gun: The ketchup bottle, the zebra pillbug, and the cymbal all get used by Kato to take out the two thugs.
- Chekhov's Gunman: When the gang is going up the stairs, a man growls at them to be quiet. He later shows back up as the owner of the cash found in the VCR.
- Droste Image: When the two Time TVs are placed across from each other, it creates a Droste effect. Luckily, there's a box of Droste-brand cocoa to illustrate the effect. The original Japanese title references the Droste image as well.
- Extremely Short Time Span: The whole movie takes place in real time, and it's already a very short movie, so the whole thing take place in under 70 minutes.
- Instant Sedation: The time cops carry futuristic stun guns that put most of the cast to sleep off-camera, though they look like toys.
- Last-Minute Hookup: At the very end, Kato and Megumi hit it off when they actually start having a normal conversation.
- Market-Based Title: The original Japanese title translates to "We at the end of the Droste."
- Once More, with Clarity: We are constantly seeing the other side of conversations we already saw, often times with additional information that puts a new spin on them.
- The Oner: The entire film is presented as a single, unbroken shot, though there are numerous disguised cuts.
- Retroactive Preparation: First displayed when one of Kato's friends asks another to name any object. When ketchup is named, he pulls out a ketchup bottle from his pants, then asks his past self to put a ketchup bottle in his pants to make the prank work. Later, Kato's friends arm him with all of the items they saw him use to take out a pair of thugs.
- Riddle for the Ages: We never find out why the two TVs became temporally linked. The two time cops just make a vague allusion to things like this occasionally happening.
- Serious Business: One of Kato's friends uses the Time TV to get a collectible toy bug he's been wanting from a vending machine.
- Stable Time Loop: This is how the time loop works. Kato only knows about it because he tells himself about it in the future, repeating what he heard his future self say when he was in the past.
- Temporal Paradox: In the end, Megumi and Kato sneeze away the memory-wiping powder after watching themselves take it in the future, creating a time paradox that wipes out the time cops' reality, causing them to fade away.
- Time Police: Two pushy time cops arrive to clean things up.
