Last time we looked at a featured Letterboxd List it was romantic comedies. This week we’re pulling from the Top 250 Science Fiction Films with River (2023).
Title: River
Director: Junta Yamaguchi
Released: June 23, 2023 (Theatrical – Japan)
Runtime: 1 hour 26 minutes
A near-empty resort by a river. Staff going about their day, except the day keeps happening again. Conversations repeat, slightly off from the last time. Time resets. Just enough memory carries over to register it’s happening again.
More people start noticing. Not all at once. Small recognition first, then it spreads through the staff as the pattern holds. The loops stabilize and routine turns into something else: mapping resets, tracking differences, testing how far each run holds before it snaps back.
The focus shifts to what carries between loops. What changes, what doesn’t, what gets remembered wrong. They start trying to build some kind of structure out of it.
And it keeps coming back to the river. Whether it’s causing it, anchoring it, or just sitting at the edge of something none of them can quite get to.
The resort feels empty in a way that’s hard to ignore. Not just sparsely populated, more like it hasn’t been fully built in the first place. That carries into the cinematography, which has a slightly flattened quality. More theatrical than cinematic, like everything is happening just in front of a stage rather than inside a space.
The time loop idea arrives early and doesn’t really hide itself. Characters pick it up quickly, and the film settles into repetition as structure. The same conversations replay with small variations, each reset another pass at mapping what’s going on. There’s a lightness to it that helps, a running humor that keeps it from stalling as the characters start gaming the system.
However, it starts to feel thin. Not in concept, but in stretch. At 86 minutes it already feels like it’s pushing it. River feels like it would have worked better as a short, where repetition sharpens instead of dilutes.
When the explanation finally lands, it commits to something specific. Specific doesn’t mean earned. It closes the loop without deepening it.
River never quite fleshes out its own concept. A few interesting structural ideas, a couple of engaging stretches, not enough variation to sustain it.
Have you seen River?
Drop a comment below and let me know what you thought!
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