'Mondays: See You “This” Week!’: Zany office comedy gets stuck on repeat

Do you ever get the feeling you’re just going around in circles? Waking up on Monday morning after pulling an all-nighter at the creative agency where she works, Akemi Yoshikawa (Wan Marui) has a daunting week ahead of her.

She’s trying to steer an impossible project to completion while making a good impression on the more illustrious firm to which she’s about to jump ship. However, the omens aren’t good: First, a pigeon flies smack into the office window, then she gets caught in a traffic accident while en route to a presentation. And it just keeps getting worse from there.

Akemi’s sense that she’s trapped in a week from hell turns out to be truer than she could have imagined, as a pair of coworkers inform her in hushed tones that the entire office is stuck in a week-long loop. They prime her with the image of that hapless pigeon to trigger her memory when the clock resets — and it’s Monday all over again.

Newly awakened, she joins the duo in their attempts to alert the rest of their colleagues to what’s going on, convinced that this is the only way to break the cycle. However, they reach an impasse with their boss, Shigeru Nagahisa (Makita Sports), a cheery has-been who seems incapable of absorbing any new information that isn’t spelled out to him in a PowerPoint presentation.

Not to worry: They’ve got plenty of time for that.

Anyone who’s worked an exasperating office job should derive a few chuckles from Ryo Takebayashi’s clunkily titled “Mondays: See You ‘This’ Week!” This frenetic comedy starts off as a playful workplace parody — full of knowing touches that betray its director’s background in advertising — before taking a turn toward the sentimental.

It might be the most densely packed cinematic confection to come out of Japan since Makoto Nagahisa’s “We Are Little Zombies” (2019). The film’s attention-deficit editing strategy announces itself during an opening credit sequence that glitches and starts replaying halfway through, and the pace barely lets up after that.

“Mondays” is terrific fun, especially during its first half. Marui shines in her first lead role since Anshul Chauhan’s “Kontora” (2021), while the rest of the cast more than pull their weight.

There’s been a glut of time loop movies and TV series lately, which Takebayashi and Saeri Natsuo’s screenplay wryly acknowledges. Their characters namecheck other examples of the genre, though not the film’s most obvious antecedent: Junta Yamaguchi’s “Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes” (2020), a no-budget cult hit that did far more ingenious things with its premise.

Having come up with such an apt metaphor for the repetitive nature of office life, the film seems to lose interest in the whole time-loop thing as it goes along. The focus shifts to an unfinished manga that Shigeru has kept tucked away in his desk, the themes of which — about generosity and living without regret — intersect rather too neatly with the movie’s own.

It’s all very heartfelt, though it suggests that Takebayashi and Natsuo were covering their bases more than they needed to. “Mondays” also doesn’t seem to know how to end. Even after a brief post-credits sequence, I felt I was still waiting for the punchline. Maybe it got lost somewhere in the film’s infinite repeat.