The film's temporal Escherings ensure that chemical additives would be superfluous. As unstuck in time as George Roy Hill's Slaughterhouse-Five, Mind Game opens with a barrage-collage of split-second moments that play like an animated found-footage film, but whose seeming randomness becomes dispelled at film's end in a now decodable recapitulation. In between, hero Nishi—a milquetoasty manga artist unable to summon the gumption to woo his high school sweetheart, Myon—dies from a yakuza's rectal gun-blast, ascends into heaven to argue with a polymorphous God, escapes from the empyrean for an earthly re-do, and ends up inside the belly of a whale, where he meets an aged castaway who has befriended the leviathan's inner ecology of extinct species. Mind Game's choose-life exuberance matches the sentiment hurled by its bitch-slap ping God at Nishi's whimpering shade: "I made you, dipshit, for my sheer enjoyment!"