Four amazing recent Japanese movies shot with four guys and hidden on platforms

Despite her cruelty to giant monsters and cities completely destroyed by the atomic bomb, the Japanese Godzilla Minus One It cost less than 14 million euros. A trifle compared to its rivals in the last edition of the Oscars, in the best visual effects category: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 It had an estimated budget of 250 million dollars, and Mission: Impossible. Sentence, mortal It cost 290 million. It was the cheapest film in the category in almost a decade, but the most melancholic Godzilla became the first Japanese film to win this statuette. There is no doubt that in the Asian country they are used to doing a lot with very little. With much less than 14 million. You just have to place the camera in the right place.

The last godzilla by Toho was a box office success and grossed more than 105 million euros and has just entered through the big door on Netflix, but there are several small recent Japanese science fiction and horror films that have had to settle for going straight into hiding in the huge catalogs of the platforms streaming, after having gone through the process of touring a genre festival. That is what has happened with these four Japanese films produced with almost no resources, but with which your head can explode. Amazing films that have even established their own subgenre: nagamawashias they now call low-budget films shot in one take.

‘Beyond the two infinite minutes’ (2020, Filmin)

Do you know the effect dostre? It is that visual game in which an image shows that same image within the image itself, creating an infinite loop. This film takes that effect to the nth degree when a cafe owner sees an image of himself on television, albeit two minutes in the future. Thus begins this 70-minute madness recorded in a false sequence shot, with a camera on the shoulder and without apparent cuts. Beyond the two infinite minutes is the best exponent of the subgenre Nagamawashi.

A visual pirouette directed by Junta Yamaguchi like few others that was only filmed for 27,000 euros. We guess something like that is what a week of catering in the filming of Tenet by Cristopher Nolan (in which temporary messages are also sent). The production plan to achieve it is almost as incredible as its plot: a theater group filmed for seven days in a cafe in Tokyo, financed by the independent cinema Tollywood. It premiered before 12 people in its audience of 40, but, thanks to crowdfunding and the scarcity of premieres during the pandemic, its distribution expanded to become a modern classic at global fantasy festivals.

It is difficult to understand how this impossible choreography was filmed in two temporal planes. A science fiction comedy that happens to thriller and even to an action movie in a matter of seconds. Pure movie magic.

‘Stuck in an infinite loop (River)’ (2023, rental on Filmin, AppleTV, MovistarPlus+, Rakuten, Google Play and Prime Video)

Yamaguchi is so obsessed with resolving everything that can happen in two minutes that his new film, which has just been released in Spain, turns that period of time into an infinite time loop, although in a much more melancholic and romantic tone. In this other movie the bar changes Beyond the two infinite minutes for a bucolic accommodation ryokan in Kyoto on the bank of a river. There the meditative protagonist prostrates herself when everything restarts again to the surprise of the workers and begging guests.

This time, the time loop will serve, in some way, so that the protagonist and those around her end up seeing life from different angles. After all, they have endless opportunities to find out. Yamaguchi uses this Groundhog Day science fiction trope to delve into the headaches of characters who don’t seem to move forward in life, and, in the process, perfect his over-the-shoulder camera technique and very long uncut sequences. It is not as funny or groundbreaking as the previous one; the surprise effect passed.

‘Mondays’ (2022, Filmin)

Is there any loop more real than a Monday at the office? Is there anyone in Japan very obsessed with Caught in time Or are they simply the perfect metaphor for Japanese days? Perhaps the answer is that capitalism and the obsession with work makes them live in a constant loop in which the only goal is to be the best at your craft and move up and up the corporate hierarchy. That is the apparent conclusion reached in this playful comedy by Ryō Takebayashi with a moral that makes a week of project delivery repeat itself incessantly from the moment a pigeon collides with a window and wakes everyone up.

This The Office Garfield the Cat’s Hate Loop isn’t as visually creative as the previous ones, and its resolution may sound childish, but fun, self-absorbed characters and a contemporary message make it work. Let’s say it’s a kind of Live by Akira Kurosawa with a bit of Nacho Vigalondo’s cinema, fast and playful and that doesn’t ask anything more of the viewer. And it has a twist compared to the rest: it begins with the loop already begun, although for these Japanese workers there is no difference. They know so little of the world outside the cubicle that they even sleep in the office on Sundays. The loop was perhaps that of real life.

‘One Cut Of The Dead’ (2018, Filmin, Prime Video)

In One Cut of the Dead, there are no complicated time jumps, although there is a lot of cinematic metalanguage. In fact, the work of Shinichiro Ueda made the nagamawashi, and even Michel Hazanavicius dared to make his (unnecessary) French version. It’s a zombie movie, yes. Or maybe a movie about how a zombie movie is made. Or simply a love song to how films are made, to the cameraman and the scriptthe makeup artist and the scriptwriter.

The filming lasted a day longer than Beyond two minutes. Eight days running through an abandoned water filtration plant, and a lot of cheap makeup, give the perfect setting for a post-apocalyptic film that only cost 23,000 euros. The assembly of its sequence shots, on the other hand, lasted four months. You’ll understand why when you see it.

His daring was so successful that this metalinguistic martianada was the seventh highest-grossing Japanese film of 2018, where it multiplied its budget by 1,000, a record that it achieved with a lot of soul and desire to pay homage to the seventh art without slander. It is not the movie it seems from its poster. And a warning: better to know as little as possible about the plot.