How much do you need to get revenge? How will you know you had enough and it is time to move on? Is that even possible? These are some of the questions the new film from director Shinji Araki “Penalty Loop” poses to us.
The film was screened last in Fantasia 2024, and I am still reflecting on what I witnessed.
“Penalty Loop” tells the story of Jun, a regular man who after taking a lot of planning and necessary measures, manages to kill the man who murdered his girlfriend. Not only by poisoning him, but also by stabbing him, and without any apparent remorse, he finishes the job by dumping the corpse in the river.
But what should have brought some sort of satisfaction and maybe closure to his grief, seemed to have never happened, as the next morning Jun finds himself waking up again at 6 o’clock on June 6th. Thinking that maybe all was a dream or an OMEN (See what I did there?) Jun executes his plan and takes his revenge, but once more, he wakes up the next morning finding himself living the same day: June 6, starting at 6 O’clock.
Jun tries to get out of this time anomaly by completing his plan again, and again, and again. But the loop keeps repeating itself. To his surprise, Jun learns that the killer he is murdering is becoming aware of what is happening, and is not very pleased.
Will the roles reverse? Is more than one person being punished here?
You need to see the film to find out.
Ok, I love movies about time travel, time loops, and of course… Revenge. So I was not going to miss this.
The movie starts very strong, and it manages to be engaging for a lot of its runtime. The chemistry between Ryûya Wakaba as Jun and Yûsuke Iseya as the criminal being punished was great. At first, it was easy to be on Jun’s side, knowing of his loss, and the apparent indifference from the murderer, but as the movie progresses, we start to wonder if we know the whole story, or if there was more to this than a simple murder case.
After several attempts of Jun to finish his revenge and move on, we get to see more of the real causes of the loop, and some of its mechanics. This brought a lot more depth to the plot and answers some questions I was having way earlier in the film: Why was the murderer released and working as if nothing happened? Why does nobody around them seem to notice what is going on? How much time has passed since the crime was committed?
All these questions are answered little by little, but then, another arises. Here is where the film might lose some of the audience, because we also start to get more comedy in what was apparently a thriller.
I would say that the sci-fi elements are minimal and barely there, but that does not make the film suffer. I actually think that by avoiding any techno-babble and rants of fictional quantum physics to make the plot more grounded, we could focus more on the existential matters in both characters. I cannot go further into details due to spoilers, but that also creates more questions, that sadly, are not going to be answered.
Also for me, the ending was a little anticlimactic. We could say that there is some catharsis at the end. But I wonder, is there? All we could call growth for a character (not saying who) may be just an illusion, or worse, just a case of self-deception, in order to continue living, but if we go with that route, it makes the whole experience we saw almost meaningless.
Maybe I’m overthinking.
I still think you should watch this film and see what you conclude.
And I will be reviewing more films doing our remote coverage, so stay tuned!
