5 More Minutes

According to the old joke, relationships are just two people asking each other what they want for dinner, stuck on endless repeat, until one of them dies. Spanish director Javier Ruiz Caldera’s ingeniously structured comedy thriller 5 More Minutes pushes this bleak punchline to darkly hilarious extremes, trapping a crisis-hit married couple in a recurring five-minute time loop that turns steadily more macabre and violent with each new rewind.

5 More Minutes never explains its audacious premise, only hinting at wider apocalyptic ripples occurring beyond the fraught events depicted on screen, and never strains to make any deeper philosophical points. But its head-spinning plot swerves, big laughs and panic-attack pacing leave little room for anyone to question the brazenly illogical cartoon carnage unfolding here in compact real-time segments.

Fresh from its world premiere in San Sebastián, Caldera’s twist-heavy crowd-pleaser feels like one of those rare Spanish productions that could travel widely beyond Spanish-speaking markets. Making its US debut at Fantastic fest in Texas this weekend, 5 More Minutes will certainly pick up more international buzz at genre-friendly festivals ahead of domestic theatrical release in January 2027.

Popular Catalan TV star Berto Romero, a regular Caldera collaborator and creator of the hit horror comedy series El Otro Lado (The Other Side), writes and co-stars here as Toni, a 50-ish husband and father whose marriage to Barbara (Belen Cuesta) is going through a rough patch. In an effort to fix their problems, the couple have booked a weekend retreat at a rented holiday home in the picturesque rolling countryside near Girona. In this rustic idyll, with no phone or WiFi signal, they hope a “digital detox” will help them relax, reboot and repair their relationship.

That is the theory at least. But soon after their eccentric property manage Carlos (Javier Cámara) hands over the keys, Toni and Barbara find themselves trapped in a mysteriously glitching time loop. Each repeat lasts precisely five minutes, returning the three protagonists to the exact same time and location, standing together in the garden. However, their memories are not wiped with each reset, so they can recall all previous five-minute scenes and adjust their behaviour accordingly. Crucially, if anything gets damaged, or if any living thing is hurt, they will not be fixed in the next chapter. The broken stay broken, the dead stay dead.

This inner narrative logic may sound arbitrary but it leads to some highly imaginative, bloodthirsty developments as 5 More Minutes gets deeper into its repeating cycles. As Toni and Barbara are consumed by escalating panic and paranoia, the body count around them mounts due to fatal road accidents, purposely broken bones, a pick-axe murder, and more. Meanwhile the musically rhythmic narrative becomes a kind of free-jazz improvisation, veering off into increasingly bizarre subplots involving cocaine, a plane crash, a shotgun-wielding psychopath and even a randomly passing horse.

Many previous films have found fruitful dramatic angles in time-loop plots, notably the beloved Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day (1993), Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998), the Tom Cruise sci-fi thriller Edge of Tomorrow (2014), and more. Caldera’s deluxe-pulp slapstick vision of this trope has echoes of fellow Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes (2007), though its playfully ironic spirit also recalls cultish elevated-genre specialists like Quentin Dupieux, Sam Raimi and Alex de la Iglesia.

Caldera and Romero walk a careful line between pure Looney Tunes slapstick, horror-adjacent gore and darker dramatic elements here. Most importantly, however goofy their premise, they approach it with impressive technical skill. The three main players give meticulously timed, fast-talking performances that crackle with compellingly nervy comic energy. Sergi Villanova Claudín’s freewheeling mobile camerawork frames most of these five-minute segments as single unbroken shots, with one elegantly dividing into two parallel split-screen viewpoints. It takes a lot of tightly choreographed, painstakingly planned work to deliver this level of delirious screwball chaos on screen. A giddy escapist pleasure from end to end, 5 More Minutes is full of surprises, most of them horribly hilarious.

Director: Javier Ruiz Caldera
Screenwriter: Berto Romero
Cast: Javier Cámara, Berto Romero, Belén Cuesta, Carlos Bernardino, Marc Soler, Clàudia Melo
Cinematography: Sergi Villanova Claudín
Editing: Alberto de Toro
Music: Clara Aguilar
Producers: Clara Valle Santos, Anna Vilella, Bernat Elias, Javier Méndez, Edmon Roch
Production companies: El Terrat (Spain), The Mediapro Studio (Spain), Ikiru Films (Spain), Movistar Plus (Spain)
World sales: Filmax, Spain
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (Official Selection)
In Spanish
92 minutes