Eternal 831 review – anime thriller stops all the clocks with a superpower

Kenji Kamiyama writes and directs this diverting anime fantasy-thriller, acceptable successful Tokyo. Suzushiro (voiced by Soma Saito) is simply a troubled lad who aft a traumatic clip astatine precocious schoolhouse has arrived successful Tokyo connected a journalism scholarship; this is astatine an unspecified aboriginal clip aft immoderate “great catastrophe”. (Perhaps astir volition deliberation of Covid: I consciousness that is not what is being indicated.) He is supplementing his income by doing a glorified insubstantial round, made much hard due to the fact that helium has to cod subscription payments door-to-door.

During 1 of the inevitable bad-tempered arguments with a lawsuit Suzushiro discovers his superpower: helium tin halt time, an quality triggered by his ain aggravated choler oregon unhappiness, and which is accompanied by a sick, short-of-breath feeling. He walks among the statue-still radical arsenic if done a poison cloud. He senses that this unspeakable powerfulness is connected with his unresolved anguish astatine a tragic lawsuit that marked the extremity of his schoolhouse career, astir which helium is inactive successful denial. Stopping clip is simply a benignant of parable for his hopeless privation to halt the bid of consequences from that clip which person followed him.

But past helium finds that a mysterious young pistillate has the aforesaid quality – helium finds himself walking among the frozen-figures of her “time-stop” order. And a violent radical calling itself “831 Front” is utilizing the stopped-time powerfulness to transportation retired attacks against the government, which it accuses of being reactionary and wanting to halt clip to perpetuate an endless self-serving vacation – the sanction meaning 31 August, the extremity of summer.

For each the aggravated play and metaphor, the stopped-time trope has thing weirdly romanticist and dreamy astir it. It reminded maine a small of Nicholson Baker’s erotic novella The Fermata – lone with earnest innocence wherever the literate porn would different go.