Of all the films I saw at Fantastic Fest 2026, 5 More Minutes was among the easiest to enjoy. It is clever, darkly funny, violent without being overwhelming, and just strange enough to feel perfectly at home at this festival.
Directed by Javier Ruiz Caldera, the Spanish film stars Berto Romero and Belen Cuesta as a married couple whose relationship is already strained as they head to an isolated country house for a weekend getaway. Javier Cámara plays the man who meets them there, shows them the property, and hands over the keys. Then, before anyone can settle in, something impossible happens: time jumps backward five minutes, and those minutes repeat endlessly.
The premise is, of course, completely implausible. No reasonable explanation for the loop exists, and the film is smart enough not to waste much time trying to invent one. Instead, it simply establishes the rules and lets the characters deal with them. That approach works far better than it should.
What makes 5 More Minutes so entertaining is how much the film accomplishes in that brief stretch of repeated time. Each reset shifts the circumstances just enough to push the story in a new direction. Information carries forward even when time does not. Tempers rise, bad decisions multiply, and what initially feels almost amusing becomes increasingly chaotic, violent, and absurd.
The humor is very dark, sometimes uncomfortably so. Some moments made me laugh; others made me cringe, sometimes within seconds of each other. The violence is sharp and surprisingly graphic in places, but it never overwhelmed the film. It serves the escalating absurdity rather than shock.
The pacing is nearly perfect. A story built around the same five minutes could have become repetitive quickly, but Ruiz Caldera and screenwriter Berto Romero keep finding ways to shift the rhythm and raise the stakes. The film moves with confidence, never lingering too long on an idea once the audience grasps it.
Romero and Cuesta work especially well together because the time loop doesn’t erase the problems in their marriage. If anything, it exposes them. Beneath the violence and increasingly bizarre circumstances lies a story about resentment, frustration, trust, and what happens when people are forced to confront the same problems again and again. That gives the film just enough emotional weight to make it more than a clever gimmick.
What I liked most was that 5 More Minutes never stopped being fun while still giving me something to think about. It is utterly strange and wildly watchable, the kind of movie that embraces an absurd idea and commits to it. That combination of clever construction, black humor, violence, and unpredictability made it exactly the kind of Fantastic Fest film I hoped to find.
And then there is the finale. Without giving anything away, it lands at exactly the right moment. After spending the entire film trapped inside repeating five-minute intervals, I reached the end wishing there were just a little more.
Five more minutes, maybe.