In Kenji Kamiyama’s drama, a boy discovers that he can halt time when emotionally stirred and that terrorists are exploiting the same power

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.