★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity: 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Director Junta Yamaguchi and screenwriter Makoto Ueda had a festival hit with their 2020 time-warping science fiction comedy Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, and the pair has doubled down on their concept of two-minute time twists with their new offering River (Japan, 2023). The result is another charming, winning sci-fi comedy that also serves up a nice amount of mystery, suspense, and tension.
Set at traditional Japanese Inn Fujiya in Kibune, Kyoto, next to the Kibune River and during snowy winter weather, River finds inn employee Mikoto (Riko Fujitani) standing at the riverside, having a strange feeling that the other employees and the guests begin to share. They realize that time is looping every two minutes and they repeatedly find themselves where they began 120 seconds earlier, but keeping their memories of what has happened before.
As the looping continues, the employees and guests — along with other characters — go through a variety of feelings and emotions, including puzzled to frustrated to despairing, as Mikoto and the others try to discover the source of what started the time loop and how they can get themselves out of it.
Rather than simply repeating a format that worked with Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, Yamaguchi and Ueda add clever twists and new ideas to give River a fresh feeling. With the characters aware of the loop and everything that happened previously, character development is solid, with amusing surprises aplenty on tap.
Fujitani gives a delightful performance, leading a highly talented cast blessed with rich, engaging characters for whom the time looping causes no small amount of self reflection. The serene riverside setting and the inn where guests stay to relax and get away from the hustle and bustle of city life — shot beautifully by cinematographer Kazunari Kawagoe — juxtaposes nicely with the frenzied proceedings that the time loops set in place.
Not a horror movie but playing at several top horror and genre film festivals, River is a whimsical, absorbing, constantly entertaining slice of fantastic cinema. Sharply scripted, deftly directed, and wonderfully acted, it is a work that genre-film fans should have a blast watching unfold.
Review by Joseph Perry
River screened as part of Fantasia, which took place in Montreal, Canada from July 20–August 9, 2023.
River will also screen as part of London’s Pigeon Shrine FrightFest on August 26, 2023.
