Crossing a Dawn (今晚正好, Zhao Badou, 2026)

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“Beijing is Beijing, no need to romanticise it,” according to the practically minded heroine of Zhao Badou’s romantic odyssey, Crossing a Dawn (今晚正好, jīnwǎn zhènghǎo). A little less zany than 2012’s similarly themed Lacuna, the heroes of Zhao’s tale of city serendipity are in their own ways yearning to believe in something beyond urban cynicism with its lack of affordable housing, dissatisfying dating app romance, scammers, and pressure to conform to socially defined notions of success.

In their own ways, Qiu (Ma Sichun) and Yuzhou (Edward Chen) are each displaced people struggling to get a foothold in the city. They spend the entire night wandering around in part because they can’t find anywhere to hook up. For various reasons that only will be disclosed in a final moment of mutual vulnerability, neither than take the other one home while they’re kicked out of a hotel when a receptionist figures out what they were planning on doing there. An attempt to borrow a friend’s apartment is also frustrated, firstly by nosy neighbours and the need to avoid waking her roommate, and then by the friend coming home unexpectedly after catching her boyfriend with another girl. Tinting (Lv Xingchen) hadn’t wanted to move in with him to preserve her own space and independence, only for him to complain it made him feel “insecure”.  

Qiu may seem cynical and materialistic, but in another way she is trying to exert a degree of control by asserting dominance over her dating life. Perhaps bearing out the superficiality of dating app culture, she seems to go for conventionality handsome men but is generally disappointed. This one wants to meet her in a supermarket, for some reason, but turns out to have been using an outdated photo. Qiu feels as if she’s once again been “scammed” by this duplicitous city, though her would be date may have an ironic point about ageism. He complains that he’s done a lot of interesting things in his life and is still the fun-loving and adventurous person he was in his youth, but no one gives him a chance. Qiu is saved from this encounter by Yuzhou, in the supermarket in search of somewhere to return his power bank, though their criticism of him turns out to be somewhat hypocritical given the extent to which both he and Qiu are misrepresenting themselves. After all, as Qiu later reflects, who can resist the temptation to make out their lives are a little more impressive than they really are if it’s just going to be for one night?

It’s clear that Qiu isn’t really looking for anything more than that. Her constant references to making money may seem cynical but also hint at the extent to which money is the only thing that can be relied on in this environment, even if others may try to con it out of you. Her desire to own her own apartment is symbolic of that root herself in this city and carve out a domestic space that’s hers alone. Yuzhou, meanwhile, says he prefers renting because it offers more freedom. In contrast to Qiu’s straightforward practicality, he is more soulful and romantic, countering Qiu’s desire for ownership by suggesting that the place doesn’t matter as long as you get to live with the person you love. 

Qiu may not, however, be quite as cynical as she seems so much as she is afraid to trust in this moment of city serendipity. Beijing beats you down, she says, like the woman still looking for a dog who went missing a year ago driven out of her mind by loneliness and disillusionment. Yuzhou has been here two years, but feels as if he’s achieved less than nothing. Their long walk through the city takes them from walk-up, multiple occupancy apartments to a vast, unoccupied mansion full of unused rooms watched over by one of Qiu’s previous hookups whose name she never found out. He too is experiencing romantic drama with a free-spirited young woman equally afraid to face her feelings. As the night wears on, the pair begin to generate a kind of intimacy that paves the way towards emotional authenticity. Whether this one magical night in the city, or the beginning of something more, they have at least crossed their own kind of dawn, now less guarded and more open to the possibilities of the world around them.

Trailer (Simplified Chinese & English subtitles)

The Crowded Train (満員電車, Kon Ichikawa, 1957)

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The Japan of 1957 moves like clockwork in Kon Ichikawa’s absurdist satire, The Crowded Train (満員電車, Manin densha). You can’t expect a seat to be there just because you want to sit down, according to go-getter Tamio, you have to fight for your place on the crowded train that is the post-war economy. His horologist father raised him to prize things like order, precision, and self-reliance, yet the irony is that in a nation like this, if everyone else’s clocks are wrong and only yours are correct, you may be better off resetting them.

Nevertheless, Tamio (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) comes to think of himself as part of the machine and does his best to slot himself into the rhythms of contemporary urban life. People move around in the same way as the bottles manufactured at the brewery where Tamio gets a job after graduating from a top university. But he soon learns fitting into the system requires a degree of compromise. On his first day at the office, he’s told off by his new boss for being overly efficient. He finished all his work before 10:30, but his daily quota is fixed and his productivity only makes things difficult for others. The head of brewery anticipates that increasing automation will allow them to increase efficiency through shedding personnel, only the unions and cultural practice won’t let them. Tamio is one of only three people was recruited for his skills. The other seven joining with him are nepotism hires that will likely drain resources due to their lack of ability, but will be promoted anyway because of their connections. 

In any case, he might have hoped for a better job after graduating from such a good university. A rational man like his father, Tamio meticulously works out how much he can expect to earn over a lifetime subtracting things likes taxes, insurance, and the costs of raising a family. It turns out, the salaryman life is rather disappointing and there’s relatively little reward at the end of it. His constant toothaches and mounting health problems are manifestations of his anxiety and buried desperation. He lives in a company dorm with no furniture surrounded by long corridors of identical rooms. Everyone leaves at the same time every morning to take their place on the train. His colleague Sarai (Eiji Funakoshi) tries to make friends with him, but also explains how most of the other men in the building have been ruined in one way or another by the salaryman life. One has returned to the dorm after his wife left him. Another has a heart condition, but has run through his sick leave and has no choice but to return to work. Tamio only got his position because the previous occupant of his room jumped from the window. 

Sarai says that he held off on making friends with Tamio because he was afraid of him. Graduates overthink things, he says, and are ill suited to the regimented life of a salaryman. The film opens with another kind of conveyor belt visualising the expansion of the educational sector beginning with a handful of graduates in the Meiji era to the present day in which there are so many the ceremony has to take place outdoors in the rain. Tamio loses his job after falling into a coma for month without giving prior notice and is told by a friend he asks for help that they just don’t need graduates from top universities. He’s eventually only able to get a job as a school caretaker by leaving his degree off resume, but is then abruptly fired when they find out. Despite the system apparently overproducing graduates it has no need for, all the teachers want their kids to university and are open to Tamio’s plan to set up school to teach people how to get in.

Meanwhile, Tamio’s father has since entered a mental institution and is apparently very happy there. Everyone else is mad except for me, he claims, but also appreciates the sense of order and precision he couldn’t find in the outside world. The doctors find it impossible tell patients apart from visitors suggesting lack of division between sanity and madness, while Tamio’s father had originally accused his mother of insanity simply for being cheerful. Cheerfulness or insanity seem to be the only ways out of this impossible situation as Tamio desperately tries to hold the roof on his shack during a storm while his mother is just happy to be able to live with her son and hopeful that her husband will get “better” so they can all live together again. “There is always another school year ahead of you,” the head teacher of the primary school tells his new charges somewhat omniously, suggesting that they too are destined to spend their lives fighting for a seat on a packed-out train with no clear destination.

Mr. Pu (プーサン, Kon Ichikawa, 1953)

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Perhaps ironically, film censorship under the American Occupation was just as heavy as it had been under the wartime authorities if tilting in a different direction. Depicting the feudal past and straitened present were equally discouraged, as was anything that showed the Occupation forces in a less than ideal light. These restrictions were, however, lifted when the Occupation came to an end in 1952 and Kon Ichikawa’s adaptation of the comic strip by Taizo Yokoyama, Pu-san (プーサン), is a relatively early attempt to address this second round of post-war chaos characterised by high unemployment and defeated hopes for the future.

Yokoyama apparently settled on the nickname “Pu-san” just because it sounded funny, though the strip later moved away from the title character to focus more on an ensemble. That may be why the name is never mentioned during the film which also incorporates elements from another Yokoyama strip, Miss Ganko. The film then focuses on mild-mannered maths teacher Noro (Yunosuke Ito), a widower and war veteran living in a boarding house where he has developed a crush on the landlady’s daughter, Kanko (Fubuki Koshiji). Noro is the sort of person destined to suffer in life as evidenced by the opening sequence in which he is almost run over by a truck, but actually ends up injuring himself by becoming entangled with a fire hydrant in his botched attempt to move out of the way.

Nevertheless, he is really at the centre of a collection of people who are struggling amid the difficult economic environment of the early 1950s in which the nation still has not fully emerged from post-war privation. His boss at the school where he works (Daisuke Kato) is clearly exploiting his nature as someone unlikely to complain about ill-treatment by asking him to work both the day and night shift for no additional pay while forgoing a pay rise he suggests he may later to give to the other teachers. Noro goes along with it because he thinks it’s better to have a job than not and others are hard to come by. His students, meanwhile, are ideologically volatile, flirting with communism or trying to defend the nascent capitalism of the democratic society. It’s one of his students that invites him to the May Day march which leads to him being caught up in the “Bloody May Day Incident” of 1952 in which the police fired on protesters opposing the Anpo security treaty killing two and injuring 2,300 people.

Because Noro is an unlucky person, a photograph of him at the event is published in the newspaper which leads to him being fired from his job. He’s then thrown into a world of job hunters jostling for work outside the employment office with seemingly hundreds of applicants for every position. Many assume him to be further up the queue because he is a university graduate, but it’s clear that things like that no longer really matter in the post-war society and may even hinder his prospects. The job he eventually finds, thanks to his landlady’s recommendation which she only gets for him with the expectation of being able to raise his rent, is working as a deliveryman for a sewing machine company. 

After the war, Singer Sewing Machines gave the patent for the Singer 15 to Japanese factories so that those which once manufactured munitions could transition to making sewing machines. However, most in the film seem to be aware that these factories are actually still making bullets for machine guns, which turns out to be the case at the factory where Noro gets a job. Japan’s post-war recovery will largely be powered by manufacturing munitions and military equipment to be used in the Korean War. This leaves Noro understandably conflicted and leads to an ongoing sense of confusion about the nature of this new “pacifist” and “democratic society”, though he justifies himself that his is only a light crime as his complicity extends only to the delivery and not to the manufacture of these deadly weapons. The ranks of the protestors at the May Day march are contrasted with those of soldiers once again marching through the streets. Harried doctor Tezuka (Isao Kimura), sick of having to rush through patients, has apparently joined the Self Defence Forces instead. 

“Miss Stubborn” Kanko, by contrast, has a good job in a bank and though she goes on a kind of date with Noro, has fallen in love with a colleague she wishes to marry. Her mother objects to the match because her boyfriend is only a middle-school graduate, but as Kanko points out he’s had a steady job and worked his way up since he was 16. A university degree might not mean very much at the present time and those who entered employment earlier might actually have a head start. In a rather cruel moment, Noro overhears Kanko tell her mother that university graduates like him are “boring” while simultaneously suggesting they take part back of the area he’s currently renting to rent out separately without reducing his rent so they can make more money. Her father, an accountant who’s ironically never made enough to pay tax, has made himself ill through overwork leaving them largely dependent on rental income. Kanko intends to continue to working after marriage, though expects that her husband will eventually be promoted to a position offering a salary that will support a family.

This is not a realistic prospect for Noro, who has now essentially been cast aside by the post-war society. His hopes of romantic fulfilment with Kanko have been dashed, exposing his vision for a rosy future as nothing more than a delusional fantasy. Caught between idealistic students who have been, like him, displaced in the new democratic era, and amoral capitalists like his former boss and landlady, he has little other choice but to retreat into the mist of an uncertain future. Unexplored subplots including a sleazy right-wing politician’s collusion with the bank manager, hint at a still murkier world of backroom deals ruled by self-interest that betrays the “democratic” ideals of the new society along with those of a man mild-mannered man like Noro who can only survive by embracing his troubles with good humour.

Scars of the Sun (太陽のきずあと, Chusei Sone, 1981)

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In the mid-1950s, a moral panic erupted as the wartime generation found themselves horrified by the world of post-war youth. They resented a generation of bright young things who listened to jazz music in cafes they saw as living hedonistic lives filled with sex and drugs. The irony is that the so-called “Sun Tribe” movement was crystallised in the writings of Shintaro Ishihara, a conservative who later became a very right-wing governor of Tokyo. His brother Yujiro, one of the biggest stars of the post-war entertainment industry, was the face of the Sun Tribe onscreen starring in several of the short-lived genre’s key titles including Ko Nakahira’s Crazed Fruit.

Chusei Sone’s Scars of the Sun (太陽のきずあと, Taiyo no Kizuato) is a reinterpretation of the Sun Tribe movie for the era of high prosperity. Almost an adaptation of Nakahira’s film, it co-opts its central love triangle and ends with a similar sequence in which the hero, Shuhei (Kenichi Kaneda), uses his speedboat to attack a former associate who has stolen his younger brother’s girlfriend and humiliated him by exposing his impotence, both literal and figural. This time, however, Shuhei’s rival isn’t his biological brother but his best friend. Shuhei thinks that this is his gang, but in reality Karasawa (Satoshi Sadanaga) is running it. They just let Shuhei play the gang boss to make use of his wealth and status. 

There is also, however, a degree of homoerotic tension between Karasawa and Shuhei with the implication that Shuhei’s impotence with women is due to homosexuality. When Shuhei arranges for his father’s bar hostess lover (Yuko Katagiri) to be gang raped, Karasawa declines to participate. He says that he does this out of sympathy for Shuhei, sitting on the sofa with him and turning down the attentions of the gang’s moll Kanako. The pair later put a record on and slow dance around the room. Karasawa’s decision to take up with Kaori (Mirai Hayashi), the apparent girlfriend of Shuhei’s estranged brother Koji (Koji Tanaka), is then a triple betrayal. Not only does he defy the longstanding rule of the group that women be shared, but ignores Shuhei’s authority and deliberately wounds him to assert his own superiority.

In a way, Shuhei did something similar in having Mayumi raped, only it doesn’t really bother his father from whom he may have learned his lack of respect for women. Mogi (Ken Ogata) is an Ishihara-esque award-winning novelist who has written screeds about the youth of the day and claims to have a special educational method for raising his son while secretly using his money to cover up all of Shuhei’s indiscretions. Shuhei’s actions are then in some part rebellions against his hypocritical father whom he resents. His unexpected reunion with Koji, his younger brother whom he hasn’t seen for 11 years since his parents’ divorce, reawakens his desire to lead a more conventional family life, though he can’t resist the urge to sabotage it by bringing Koji into his seedy gang boss life as a means of pushing him away.

The implication is also that all of Shuhei’s problems are due to a lack of maternal input and his father’s many failures as a man and a parent. He doesn’t know how to deal with a corrupted parental legacy and is essentially looking for a way back to his mother (Kyoko Enami). When he finally decides to see her, he tidies himself up and puts on a smart suit, making a point of telling his mother not to worry about him because he’s doing okay and will visit again soon, though all the evidence suggests he may be planning to go somewhere from which there is no return. He says that he has erased his other self, in one sense meaning Karasawa as an embodiment of his dark side while seemingly wanting to escape his father’s hypocrisy and corrupted morals to return to a more wholesome domesticity represented by his absent mother. With a lack of parental boundaries or guidance from his father, Shuhei is ultimately thrown into the arms of another authority figure in the form of the police force, signalling the futility of his rebellion. Sone seems to set Shuhei apart in this world, creating vistas of emptiness around him that he childishly tries to fill with violence and transgression amid the vacuity of an age of excess only to discover nothing but loneliness and desperation. 

Scars of the Sun is available as part of the Chusei Sone Double Feature box set.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Sorum (소름, Yoon Jong-chan, 2001)

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There are different types of ghosts, according to frustrated novelist Lee (Gi Ju-bong) in Yoon Jong-chan’s supernaturally tinged noir, Sorum (소름). Some don’t know they’re dead yet, others possess the bodies of living people. In their own way, the residents of the Migum apartment block all seem to be wandering ghosts themselves, stuck in this place that’s somewhere between life and death that they otherwise seem unable to escape while the building saps the life out of them with its depressing decor and flickering lights.

One might ask themselves why it is that taxi driver Yong-hyeon (Kim Myung-min) has chosen to move in here given that the building is scheduled for demolition. Obviously, the rent is cheap, not least because the previous tenant died in mysterious circumstances, though Yong-hyeon appears to have been unaware of that. Not that it bothers him. For all intents and purposes, he is our hero, a newcomer to this strange and lonely building meeting its ghostly inhabitants for the time. But gradually, we start to wonder about him. Police start sniffing round in connection with the disappearance of a woman said to have embezzled money and borrowed signifiant amounts from friends for no clear purpose. Suspiciously, Yong-hyeon has a bag of women’s jewellery including a ring hidden in his fridge, which would at least have paid a deposit on a nicer apartment if he were able to sell them. 

It’s the ring that attracts the attention of his neighbour, Seon-yeong (Jang Jin-young), who is trapped in an abusive relationship with a man who has a gambling problem. Whether driven or drawn here, Yong-hyeon develops a fascination with Seon-yeong that he later finds difficult to categorise. When she appears before him covered in blood, he helps her bury her husband’s body and then enters a sexual relationship with her that is equally ill-defined. Hearing her say that anyone would have done while arguing with her friend and neighbour Eun-soo (Jo An) causes him to doubt her motivations. Perhaps she’d been waiting for an opportunity to kill her husband and merely made use of his attraction to her to help her do it.

But at the same time, there’s a curiously incestuous quality to their relationship in that Seon-yeong is trapped in the inertia of grief having “lost” her son. Yong-hyeon is an orphan who has no place to call home and on some level is in search of a mother, latching on the maternal quality he sees in Seon-yeong. She buys a scarf for him, as a mother might for a son, while he is touched by her bending down to tie his shoelaces, wondering if his mother would have been kind like her had he had one. Their connection is also echoed in the mysterious history of the apartment in which a woman is said to have been murdered by her husband 30 years previously. The couple had a baby who was left alone there and likely would have starved to death if it had not been for a fire which led to his rescue by other residents. 

The apartment’s previous tenant, aspiring novelist Gwang-tae, had been investigating the murder as material for a book before he died in mysterious circumstances, apparently the victim of a hyper-localised fire which occurred only in the centre of the room. Gwang-tae had claimed that the apartment was haunted by the ghost of a woman singing a lullaby who insisted her son would soon return. Gwang-tae told his girlfriend Eun-soo, pregnant with their child, that he needed to leave this building or something bad would happen to him, but like everyone else, he found himself unable to. His story then becomes fodder Lee, whose latest attempt to make a literary comeback may not all be his work though he continues to try to write the story we are currently watching by constructing a fanciful narrative around Yong-hyeon and the apartment and then convincing himself that what he’s writing is coming true. 

In that sense, he may have an authorial god complex or extreme main character syndrome, while for Yeong-hyeon it’s the opposite. He’s learned to live a carefree life by acting on his impulses and then giving them no more thought. The last thing he wanted to be was the protagonist of this story, though he begins to discover strange and unexpected connections with the building and the tragedy that occurred there 30 years previously. This is the “invisible fear” that Lee proclaims as the high point of his novel, a noirish sense of dread that suddenly reorders an ordinary person’s existence. Yeong-hyeon is no longer someone who exists within the world. The world now exists around him. Lee suggests the ghost in 504 is trying to trap her adult son within this purgatorial space in order to escape her loneliness, just as everyone else is trapped in this building by irresolvable despair. Yeong-hyeon knows he has to get out, but at the same time, where else is there to go? All he can see is the building blinking back at him, refusing to give up its ghosts.

My Name (내 이름은, Chung Ji-young, 2026)

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An ageing woman’s internalised anxiety and inability to remember her childhood stand in for a nation’s wilful amnesia in Chung Ji-young’s gentle contemplation of the legacy of the massacre that began on 3rd April 1948 on Jeju Island. Set mainly in the late 90s a decade or so after Korea’s transition to democracy, the film emphasises the importance of reckoning with the buried past in order to prevent its mistakes occurring again.

Those mistakes are largely reflected in the life of cheerful teenager Young-ok (Shin Woo-bin) who is embarrassed by the fact his single mother is much older than all the other parents while she also gave him a name that is customarily given to girls. On the first day of the new term, Young-ok’s teacher Mr Hwang (Heo Dong-won) mockingly refers to him as “Miss Young-ok” with exaggeratedly feminine gestures. Hwang is, in many ways, a relic of the authoritarian past and his mocking of Young-ok’s name bears out the toxic masculinity of a militarised society. Min-soo (Choi Jun-woo), Young-ok’s more astute best friend, takes the teacher to task for skipping over the massacre in their contemporary history classes. Hwang tells him that it is “unimportant” as it does not even appear on the university exams, brushing off Min-soo’s protests that the city wouldn’t be gearing up to commemorate the 50th anniversary of an “unimportant” event. If it were important, it would be in the text book, Hwang insists demonstrating his lack of curiosity and authoritarian mindset. Of course, it later turns out that he is also corrupt. Young-ok’s mother Jeong-sun (Yeom Hye-ran) brings a “gift” to parents’ day, but ends up not giving it to him after noticing that his desk draw is full of other envelopes while he makes veiled comments about all the kids being “equal”, but some being more equal than others depending on how thick those envelopes are.

The film seems to equate this masculine jockeying for power with the origins of the massacre as the boys engage in slapping games similar to the way in which the army forced the villagers to slap their friends who had been accused of being communist sympathisers to prove their own loyalty. Rich kid Kyung-tae (Park Ji-bin) has just transferred in from Seoul having apparently caused some trouble there due to his violent outbursts. He too makes the kids engage in slapping games to define hierarchy, while using picking up on Young-ok as a useful stooge too naive to see that Kyung-tae has manipulated him into becoming class president because unlike Min-soo he will be easy to control. Young-ok is too concerned with being liked and is happy to have been co-opted into Kyung-tae’s gang, going along with his violent rule and even betraying Min-soo by siding with Kyung-tae even when he makes him lie on his behalf. This is where it starts, as the film would have it, by failing to stand up to a thuggish teen leveraging his wealth and status to dominate those around him.

Jeong-sun, meanwhile, is encouraged to address the cause of her anxiety rather than suppress it with medication by a doctor newly arrived from Seoul. Delving into the source of her trauma awakens memories of the massacre that it had long been taboo to talk about. The subsequent connections to both Korea’s involvement with the Vietnam War and the Gwangju Uprising in 1980 in which ordinary people were once again murdered by the state echoing what had happened in Jeju hint at a destructive legacy of militarised authoritarianism infecting all areas of society. In order to fully progress into the new democratic future, the nation will need to reckon with its autocratic past which begins with the act of remembrance. 

This is really what Jeong-sun begins to do in unlocking the traumatic memories of her childhood and with them reclaiming her authentic identity that also informs that of Young-ok. As she told him, she dances when she’s happy and also when she’s sad, but there is something quite poignant in her dancing her in the memory of those who lost their lives during the massacre as if she were liberating both their souls and her own by resolving to go on building a better, kinder world that remembers its past and is mindful not to repeat it.

My Name screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Kinki (近畿地方のある場所について, Koji Shiraishi, 2025)

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“No one can be saved now” intones a victim of a curse having apparently accepted the futility of his situation. In Koji Shiraishi’s Kinki (近畿地方のある場所について, Kinki Chiho no aru basho ni tsuite), adapted from the writings by Sesuji later published in novel form, everything is indeed connected, though our heroes will spend the majority of the film trying to figure out how. Yet perhaps these breadcrumbs were dropped for someone to find, and in a certain kind of way the mystery in the end finds us no matter how we may try to hide from it or mistakenly believe that the truth will set us free.

A case in point, there are two mysteries in play. The first, the editor of a paranormal magazine has disappeared taking his laptop containing the draft of an upcoming article with him. His assistant, Ozawa (Eiji Akaso), calls in a freelance writer, Chihiro (Miho Kanno), to help him reconstruct the article using the materials Sayama (Atom Shukugawa) left behind. Finding Sayama is something of a secondary goal in that they are less interested in what happened to him and why he disappeared than they are in what he was investigating. They only want to find him to recover his article.

Yet the materials he left behind are strangely full of missing people and connected only by a series of strange images such as a woman jumping with her arms stretched out towards a tree, an eerie drawing of a figure under a torii gate with the symbols either for “woman” or “end” surrounding it, and references to local folklore that all point to the “certain place in the Kinki region” mentioned in the title. In the course of their investigation, Chihiro and Ozawa are also unwittingly exposing themselves to whatever Sayama may have seen, running the gamut from fragments of old TV programmes on worn VHS, to forgotten internet viral videos, and even a slightly creepy children’s animation based on a local folktale and intended to preserve local culture.

Perhaps some of these curses are indeed ridiculous. No one really believes in the power of a chain letter, as a gaggle of high school girls giggle over a viral text that says they’ll die if they don’t pass it on. But it’s hard to deny the eeriness that surrounds the disappearance of a ghost hunting vlogger who appears to have lost his mind after straying into an abandoned house, or the young student whose friend disappeared after watching a viral video titled “Watch this and die”. The young student later finds himself haunted too, but his attempt to enlist a Buddhist priest for help goes disastrously wrong, as does Chihiro’s to consult a psychic.

Whatever’s connecting this disparate series of strange events appears to be something dark and evil. But on the other hand, what lies behind it is maternal grief and the desire to reclaim something that has been lost. As part of their investigation, the pair come across a strange cult that promises its devotees that their loved ones will return if they worship their god. The local folktale, meanwhile, is about a heartbroken son who is devastated by the loss of his mother. A wizard who descends from heaven tells him that he cannot bring his mother back and should try to find a wife to ease his loneliness, which could he do by offering her a persimmon only no one is interested and he dies of loneliness. 

This might be the cause of the mysterious mantra “thank you for finding me” that is heard on several tapes, as if this presence, whatever it is, is happy to have been recognised though it otherwise spells doom for those coming into contact with it. It has, however, seemingly weaved its way into the fabric of society, pushing its way into the digital realm as a background presence in every creepy video that haunts the internet. “You could have warned me,” Chihiro exclaims after seeing something unpleasant in a video Ozawa played for her, but really there is no warning any more and you have no control when videos autoplay on your feed. Even if you choose not to look, they come at you from ubiquitous screens and short of going to live alone in the mountains, they’ve become impossible to avoid. For some, however, these disparate clues act like stepping stones towards a particular destination they will stop at nothing to reach. Yet the scariest thing of all may be that at the end of the trail there are no answers, only more questions, and a deepening sense of mystery in that which cannot be explained.

Kinki screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

BRAND NEW LOVE (Ryuichi Iwakura, 2025)

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Are antique shops a sign of love enduring, or of our inability to let things go even when they may have outlived their usefulness? Whatever the answer, it’s the perfect place for the troubled couple at the centre of Ryuichi Iwakura’s Brand New Love to face a crisis in their fracturing relationship. The burden of forced politeness colliding with slowly accumulated resentment threatens to push the pair beyond breaking point, but at the same, perhaps they aren’t quite yet ready to part with an idealised vision of their past romance.

Then again, the distance between them is evident in the opening sequence in which Kenichi walks one way while Yuiko continues in another. Kenichi was evidently going the wrong way, at least in terms of their current destination, though Yuiko didn’t bother to tell him, instead waiting for Kenichi to figure it out for himself. Kenichi seems to be in a bad mood overall because they were supposed to be taking a trip for his birthday, their first in four years, but cancelled to help Yuiko’s uncle out tending his antique shop while he attends a wedding. 

It might be a bad omen that the uncle, Goro, is divorced and the pair are staying in his former family home where he hasn’t finished packing up his ex wife’s things. In any case, Yuiko’s rejection of Kenichi’s assumption they’d be sleeping in the same room seems to signal doom for the relationship from the outset. But unexpectedly it’s Yuiko who takes a shine to a pair of matching tea cups that to her come to symbolise the couple’s relationship. The cups have technically been sold to a woman who’s coming to pick up her order the following day, but Yuiko can’t seem to bear to part with them.

The film is at it’s most interesting in Yuiko’s interaction with the other woman, Rei, who originally bought the cups in Italy with the intention of giving them to her partner, though they broke up before she had a chance. She got rid of the cups because they’d lost their purpose, but now she wants them back again, not to reclaim the failed romance but as a means of looking towards a new one. She intends to keep the cups until she finds someone worth giving them to. But on hearing Yuiko say she wanted to give them to her boyfriend, Rei surrenders them to her. 

The gift does, in a way, begin to repair their relationship, but in the act of doing so becomes broken beyond repair. In what seems like an ongoing flirtation with Rei, Yuiko vows to stick the cup back together to show her and as a kind of apology, while Kenichi decides to leave town but is prevented from doing so by a train outage during which he meets a man mourning the loss of his grandfather. Kenichi perhaps insensitively suggests he sell his grandfather’s camera if he doesn’t know how to use it, perhaps to the antique shop, before taking a moment to reflect on what he’s said and perhaps on his decision to exit the relationship. 

The cup is eventually repaired, though in an unexpected and not altogether aesthetically pleasing way which seems to suggest that the couple may be locked into this otherwise unhappy relationship for the rest of their days. Despite having dangled the promise of a “brand new love” for Yuiko at least, the film’s closing moments suggest the title may be ironic. Or else, perhaps the pair really have managed to find their way back to each other and past all the petty resentments and little niggles that creep into a long-term relationship, though they haven’t really done much to resolve any of those issues so much as reflect they may not be ready to walk away. Making fantastic use of natural light and a claustrophobic 4:3 frame, Iwakura subtly explores the growing distance between the couple in their silences and barbed remarks along with a quiet yearning that runs underneath all the resentment and frustration until all that’s left is the desire to save something that may already be beyond saving.

BRAND NEW LOVE screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Gosh!! (THE オリバーな犬、(Gosh!!) このヤロウ MOVIE, Joe Odagiri, 2025)

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The world is full of strange things, according to the canine hero of of Joe Odagiri’s surreal comedy. GOSH!! (THE オリバーな犬、(Gosh!!) このヤロウ MOVIE, THE Oliver na Inu, (Gosh!!) Kono Yaro MOVIE) Edited down from a TV series, the film takes place in a kind of Lynchian dream space in which once can embrace one’s inner desires, while in the ostensibly “normal”, everyday world, Odagiri himself stars as a foul-mouthed, lecherous police dog burdened by the legacy of his legendary father whose disappearance remains unsolved. 

In another way, perhaps Oliver’s animalistic antics are a mirror for his handler Aoba’s (Sosuke Ikematsu) repressed desires or rebellion against his straight-laced personality. Describing himself as someone with a strong sense of justice, Aoba’s initial attempts to find his feet as an ordinary street cop were hamstrung by his clumsiness. He became a police dog handler hoping to find the perfect partner with whom he could find the “firmest trust,” only to be saddled with Oliver. Nevertheless, his ability to see him as a middle-aged deadbeat in a dog suit he can converse with in human language suggests a kind of synchronicity between dog and handler as is later praised by trainer Hagoromo (Eri Fukatsu).

The disappearance of Oliver’s father Rudolph, however, is one of the film’s central mysteries and linked with that of “Super Volunteer” Konishi (Koichi Sato) who has gone missing while looking for missing persons. Konishi seems to have been a regular salaryman before being struck by some kind of cosmic force that linked him with Rudolph and causes him to occasionally behave like a dog, in contrast to Oliver’s behaving like a human. He also ends up lost in a kind of other world with Rudolph’s former handler Mizoguchi (Masatoshi Nagase) who has become a freelance reporter and is recruited by his niece to investigate a sighting of a “little old man fairy” a boy she runs into is trying to catch. 

Each of these incidents is linked by the sound of glass smashing which echoes that in the Red Room-like cabaret of the dream space and acts as a means of breaking the spell. Playing out as a series of surreal episodes connected by the presence of strange red doors leading to other worlds, there is a definite blurring of the real world and that of dreams along with a meta dimension that allows those trapped within it to question their reality. A policewoman (Kumiko Aso) wonders why the whole room suddenly embarked on an elaborate dance routine when she arrived to confront her father but has no real answer, abruptly returning to a more concrete reality. 

Her father, meanwhile, had wanted to share a part of himself hitherto hidden from her that we later see fulfilled in the dream space. While this dream world appears to be somewhere that repressed desires are fulfilled, it seems that it may not have a wholly positive effect and as Oliver warns us at the film’s conclusion, there may be some doors that are best left closed. Nevertheless, making several homages to David Lynch including the discovery of a severed ear, Odagiri conjures an atmosphere of strangeness and mystery that goes beyond the weirdness of humanoid of dogs and alternate realities in which everything is the same but everyone is obsessed with takoyaki.

To that extent, Aoba becomes a kind of straight man frustrated by all this weirdness but unable to restore order to the world around him or accept the parts of himself that Oliver reflects. In his opening interview, he refuses to accept his fate, disrupting the interviewer’s questions by stating that he does not believe that his destiny is to be a dog handler, not because he is being modest about his abilities, but fundamentally because he resents his present reality and thinks he deserves better than being shackled to Oliver. There is, however, more to this world than we can fully understand with its various absurdities in which everything is strangely connected and “distortions in spacetime” can have profound effects on us all. Though some of its obscurity may stem from the film’s TV series origins with several seemingly pivotal characters appearing only for a few moments, there is a genuine sense of mystery and unease to be found within the noirish world that exists beyond a door some may wish they had never opened.

Gosh!! screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (no subtitles)

God Skin (หมัดเทวา ท้าเดิมพัน, Paween Purijitpanya, 2026) [Fantasia 2026]

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In the closing moments of Paween Purijitpanya’s God Skin (หมัดเทวา ท้าเดิมพัน), protagonist Win (Sutthirak Subvijitra) remarks that the question isn’t if we can win the game, but if it was always rigged against us from the start. The house always wins, the film seems to say, though most people never even realise they were playing the game. Win comes to the realisation only too late, reflecting that he was suckered in by that first win that encouraged him to think that the system was fair when, in reality, it was anything but.

Set in the near future, Win is one of many regular office workers who’ve lost their jobs to AI. He now works as a food delivery driver, but struggles to meet his expenses while caring for his mother who has serious health issues. When he runs into old school friend It seemingly by chance, he’s introduced to an underground world of illicit prizefighting in which the wealthy and powerful bet on augmented matches in which they can award special items to fighters enhanced with all-powerful nanobots. Evicted from his apartment and with his mother hospitalised awaiting expensive medical treatment, Marwin decides it might be worth stepping into the ring despite his age and lack of familiarity with the game.

The fact is that in this world, Win’s physicality is almost irrelevant while his body is exploited as a tool for wealthy men to fight each other by proxy. Against the odds he manages to make it past the first round with the help of unlikely patron Guan Yu, an anime obsessive nicknamed “nerdass”, who takes a liking to him because of his bold, underdog spirit. Though he swore to do this only once to get the money for his mother’s operation, Win is emboldened by his unexpected success, and decides to continue playing despite knowing the potential health risks involved with upgrading his nanobots and exposing himself to physical punishment in the ring. 

In a way, this kernel of greed that exists within Win’s desire for success subtly undercuts the film’s sense of rebellion against the inherent unfairness of a capitalistic system especially once it becomes clear that some of what’s happening to him is a direct consequence of questionable choices he himself may have made. Then again, perhaps it’s fairer to say that he fell victim to an irresponsible product designed to prove addictive and exploit a sense of dissatisfaction with the system even if it seems his life may have been comfortable enough as it was without being tricked into always wanting more.

But in the world of underground prizefighting, he can convince himself he’s not fighting for himself but for others. After covering his mother’s medical expenses, he becomes determined to pay off the debts of his high school girlfriend Praewa who has apparently been sold to the bar as a hostess to satisfy her father’s debts. There are two female fighters, one a former hostess and the other a transwoman, who are also challenging this system in the ring though it seems fighting to protect his mother and girlfriend becomes a key factor in Win’s sense of himself as a masculine hero succeeding through physical dominance of other men in the gladiatorial ring. He is unwilling to fight women on an equal footing, and when he discovers that his opponent is only a teenager refuses to fight altogether while taking It to task over the game’s questionable ethics. 

Nevertheless, Win stays in this world because he still thinks he can win even as his body begins to betray him. It isn’t really about Praewa or his mother, he wanted to be a winner without realising that the only “winners” are the men upstairs and you can’t become one of those by playing the game honestly. It may have succeeded in becoming one, but only by accepting that being an elite means exploiting other people’s desperation to get them to fight for you while creaming most of the profits. That’s not even something that’s really occurred to Marwin, who is as the mad scientist nanobot tattooist says, not someone who’s naturally disposed to hurting other people which makes him a natural sucker for this game. Bleak and dystopian in the extreme, the conclusion seems to suggest that in the end, Win was a victim of his own deluded hopes who never realised the only way to win was not to play in the first place.

God Skin screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.