Kenji Kamiyama writes and directs this diverting anime fantasy-thriller, set in Tokyo. Suzushiro (voiced by Soma Saito) is a troubled boy who after a traumatic time at high school has arrived in Tokyo on a journalism scholarship; this is at an unspecified future time after some “great catastrophe”. (Perhaps most will think of Covid: I sense that is not what is being indicated.) He is supplementing his income by doing a glorified paper round, made more difficult because he has to collect subscription payments door-to-door.
During one of the inevitable bad-tempered arguments with a customer Suzushiro discovers his superpower: he can stop time, an ability triggered by his own intense anger or unhappiness, and which is accompanied by a sick, short-of-breath feeling. He walks among the statue-still people as if through a poison cloud. He senses that this terrible power is connected with his unresolved anguish at a tragic event that marked the end of his school career, about which he is still in denial. Stopping time is a kind of parable for his desperate wish to stop the train of consequences from that time which have followed him.
But then he finds that a mysterious young woman has the same ability – he finds himself walking among the frozen-figures of her “time-stop” order. And a terrorist group calling itself “831 Front” is using the stopped-time power to carry out attacks against the government, which it accuses of being reactionary and wanting to stop time to perpetuate an endless self-serving holiday – the name meaning 31 August, the end of summer.
For all the intense drama and metaphor, the stopped-time trope has something weirdly romantic and dreamy about it. It reminded me a little of Nicholson Baker’s erotic novella The Fermata – only with earnest innocence where the literary porn would otherwise go.
• Eternal 831 is in cinemas from 13 December.