Category: Festivals

Unchained (四月の余白,  Keisuke Yoshida, 2026)

Posted on by

Can a person really change, or should we just accept that some people are born bad and can’t be accepted in mainstream society? This seems to be the question at the centre of Keisuke Yoshida’s empathetic drama Unchained (四月の余白, Shigatsu no Yohaku) which suggests, in a way, that violence is a vicious circle as society tends to write off those with behavioural issues pushing them deeper into their isolation and giving them little opportunity for reform or rehabilitation.

“Mister Nishi” (Wataru Ichinose), as he seems to be known, is a former delinquent who committed acts of heinous violence in his youth, spent time in prison, and experienced a personal tragedy that acted as a wake up call and gave him the opportunity to turn his life around. He now works at a kind of tough love bootcamp that attempts to guide wayward teens back towards the mainstream. His methods, however, are not universally approved and especially not by contemporary teachers. Though corporal punishment has long been outlawed in educational facilities, Nishi believes that sometimes there is no other way to reach these children and violence may be the only way to teach them that their actions have consequences. 

A teacher takes him to task and asks him if he isn’t just teaching them to be violent and in fact pushing them towards and anti-social behaviour. Nishi disagrees, but the film doesn’t really explore the alternative any further and more or less sides with Nishi. The children at the facility do seem to be doing better than they presumably were beforehand and do not appear to be unhappy there. It also seems that they are expected to do farm work, and it’s unclear if they’re being compensated for that, though this may be a slight cultural difference that is not raised in the film either by the documentary crew that comes to film the facility nor by a journalist who tries to take Nishi down by accusing him of fabricating details of his backstory which eventually leads to the facility closing down. 

Nishi may, however, have met his match in Kaito (Hayato Kohsaka), a violent young man exhibiting an extreme lack of empathy. Kaito’s teacher first seeks out Nishi because she’s at a loss of what else to do, while the boy’s mother appears to be a good woman who has tried everything she can and is now at the end of her tether. Kaito has become violent towards her too and apparently beat the family dog to death in a fit of rage for which he feels no remorse. The mother is beginning to feel suicidal and willing to try Nishi’s methods as a last-ditch effort to save her family. There is no clear reason why Kaito became this way. We get a hint of generational violence in that Kaito seems to resent his father who is disabled and in his view defeated by life. His father does seem to have become depressed because of his disability and it’s because of the depression and sense of worthlessness that he’s been unable to hold down a job and has taken to drink.

In a twist of fate, it turns out that it was Nishi who crushed his knee and left him permanently disabled. Kaito’s father therefore piles all of his resentment onto him without taking any responsibility for the choices he made himself after that. When Kaito ironically injures another boy in the same way, his father begins to realise his mistakes and cautions the other boy against becoming consumed by resentment or a sense of defeat. It’s this notion of “defeat” that becomes central to the interrogation of a cultural notion of toxic masculinity in which the reason some of these young men are thought to act out is that they don’t want to be seen as losers and harm others to prove their superiority. This is in part true of Kaito who declares himself happy to hurt other people as long as he himself does not get hurt. It’s not that he is incapable of understanding that others experience pain in the same way that he does, but that he simply does not really care. 

Some argue that Nishi doesn’t either and that, as he was a delinquent himself, he is incapable of fully sympathising with victims and only has empathy for those commit acts of violence. Nevertheless, that does give him a unique perspective that allows him to help some of these teens both by supporting them and being a positive role model as someone who has been able to reform and live a more mainstream, settled life. Then again, some seem dubious of the way he seems to change after the media takes interest which leaves him with less time for the children while chasing the spotlight. Ms. Kusano (Kaho), meanwhile, wonders if she did the right thing or perhaps just did what was easiest for her in abandoning Kaito into Nishi’s care. She chastises herself for having forgotten a model student who spoke to her at a reunion while uncertain if it’s right to devote so much of her time to kids like Kaito rather than supporting those he victimised such as student who withdrew from the school due to his bullying.

While a fellow teacher’s characterisation of Kaito as a”bad apple” who should be “discarded” before he causes any more trouble may seem callous, it’s also true that without his influence the other kids who’d been in his gang begin to straighten out and give more thought to their futures. Though he struggles at the facility, Kaito does seem to benefit in a way from a less stimulating environment and shows signs of change, if also of self-sabotage and an inability to walk away from his delinquent life for fear of being seen as a loser. It’s only after he’s cajoled into another act of violence and receiving kindness in return that he begins to see the error of his ways. The film seems to suggest, then, that person can change but that equally society has to let them, rather than try to tear them down as they did to Nishi in denying him his fresh start by reminding him that no apology is enough to change what he did in the past. While perhaps controversial in some of its implications, the film is at least empathetic and even handed, filmed in an unostentatious style that tries to sympathise both with the dealers and the receivers of violence in the conviction that there is no one who cannot change.

Unchainedscreened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Flames of a Flower (火の華, Oudai Kojima, 2024)

Posted on by

A former soldier finds it difficult to adjust to civilian life after becoming involved in a fire fight in which a close friend died while on a peace-keeping mission in South Sudan in Oudai Kojima’s politically-inflected drama, Flames of a Flower (火の華, Hi no Hana). The film takes its title from the literal meaning of the Japanese word for fireworks, but its hero is also in some senses closely aligned with a flower, both as a kind of sacrificial object burned after outliving its usefulness, and in also slowly growing in the nurturing environment of a family-run fireworks factory until finally coming into bloom.

Shimada’s (Ikken Yamamoto) growth is only, however, one side of the story as the film draws inspiration from a real-life incident of a Japanese soldier dying in a combat situation in Sudan which was covered up by the authorities as, under the pacifist constitution, Self Defence Force troops are not supposed to be deployed in combat areas while on peace-keeping missions. While serving in South Sudan, Shimada’s troop is ambushed and he is forced to shoot a child soldier when his comrade and close friend is killed after having put his gun down in an attempt to defuse the situation. While he and fellow soldier Tanaka (Ippei Tanaka) attempt to get Furukawa to a hospital, Captain Ito (Yohei Matsukado) is left behind and thereafter presumed to have been killed. On his return, Shimada is forced to sign confidentiality documents that prevent him from talking about what really happened on the grounds of national security, while the authorities report that Furukawa and Ito died as a result of a traffic accident.

It’s this inability to speak the truth that informs Shimada’s trauma as much as it is the physical stressors of the battlefield or his guilt over having to kill the child soldier. Two years after the incident, he’s working as a welder in a small factory but experiences a flashback which causes him to assault a colleague. Though his boss is sympathetic, he has no other option than to let Shimada go, but introduces him to a friend, Fujii (Masato Ibu), who runs a fireworks factory and seems to have a track record with rehabilitating those with difficult backgrounds. Working in a fireworks factory might not seem the best option given Shimada’s condition, but at the same time it gives him the opportunity to do something more constructive with the same material that caused so much destruction while he was a soldier. The film plays on this dichotomy, Shimada later visiting Sudan again to teach the children about fireworks as a means of explaining to them that they have a choice between using gunpowder for fear and killing or making something beautiful, but at the same time it ignores the third option which is obviously just not to have anything to do with gunpowder in the first place. 

Showing the children the fireworks plays into the idea that children are cruelly robbed of their dreams by egotistical adults, hinting both at the children who are forced to become soldiers, and Fujii’s own regret that he would not let his daughter Akiko (Yurina Yanagi) become a fireworks technician. She has since become a florist working with a literal kind of flowers and also helping Shimada with his recovery. His former comrades, however, have largely become consumed with anger and rage against the government for its lack of transparency. Ito, having survived, has formed a militia after meeting a former member of the Japanese Red Army and is planning some kind of revolutionary action to change the society.

Exactly how they mean to change it isn’t altogether clear aside from a clear desire for transparency and also an end to Japan’s dependence on the US for defence which they argue drags them into situations they don’t belong in because of American foreign policy they might not necessarily agree with. They don’t quite state if that means having a standing army that could go to war if necessary, or if they still believe in pacfism but want the Americans out. In any case, they plan to expose the fact that the government prioritises its diplomatic arrangements over the lives of ordinary citizens while keeping from them that this puts Japanese troops in danger overseas. 

A subsequent plot by a government official working with a Chinese gangster (Kim Chang-bak) who Shimada meets after ironically becoming involved with trading illegal weapons, further muddies the waters, though the film is at its best in exploring the ways in which Shimada is able to come to accommodation with himself while being supported by those at the fireworks factory who become a kind of surrogate family. This sense of community is, the film suggests, what prevents him from jumping off the deep end like his former comrades who have become dangerously fixated on revenge. Though at times its politics may seem muddled or obscure, the film is at least at pains to stress that war and violence are choices that are often made by those who won’t have to suffer the consequences, when it is much easier to channel those same resources into something beautiful that can bring hope and enrich lives rather than destroying them.

Flames of a Flower screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Ranshima Bound (蘭島行, Yoshitaka Kamada, 2025)

Posted on by

A middle-aged man dejectedly sitting on the side of the street drinking glances at his phone and we notice that his mother is the only person on his call list with several calls on recent days lasting only seconds. He then receives a call from his brother informing him that she is in a coma after having apparently attempted to take her own life in the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis she had not shared with either of them. 

Apparently autobiographically inspired, Yoshitaka Kamada’s Hokkaido-set drama Ranshima Bound (蘭島行) examines fracturing familial relationships and the subterfuge that is sometimes necessary to make them work. After receiving the phone call, Yoshio comes across the body of a woman floating in a river. Next thing we know, she’s travelling with him to Ranshima where he purchases a pair of wedding rings and dress in a pawn shop. Feeling unhappy about what he has achieved in life, he asks Maki (Yuko Kii) to pose as his wife so that he can show her off to his mother when she wakes up.

It seems that Yoshio (Tomoki Kimura) went to Tokyo to be a punk musician, play in a band, and change the world, but he is no longer living a punk lifestyle and his musical dreams seem not to have panned out. He tells his brother than he has a part-time job inspecting concrete to ensure it meets safety standards, but it is not clear if this is actually the truth. Satoshi, meanwhile, is a respectable middle-aged man with a successful career who is married with a teenage daughter. The two brothers seem to be somewhat estranged and not particularly well informed about what’s going on with each other’s lives, though Satoshi is still a little hurt and surprised that Yoshio has apparently got married without even letting him know. In any case, he tries to include Maki in all the arrangements while she does her best to play along.

She does, however, become unexpectedly upset when the two brothers joke about disposing of their mother’s ashes, perhaps because she comes to stand in for the mother’s absence. Reading his mother’s diaries, Yoshio comes to understand his mother’s wishes for after her death and also that she missed her sons who seemed not to have paid her much attention while she was alive. For unexplained reasons, she didn’t contact them when their father passed away and seems to have become depressed in her widowhood even before the cancer diagnosis. Both sons appear to feel guilty in different ways, Yoshio having avoided his mother because of his internalised shame and suspicion that she would have preferred him to become a regular salaryman like his brother. Satoshi, meanwhile, justifies himself that he prioritised his family, though as it turns out he maybe a victim of his own “success”. His marriage is failing largely because he is always away working and hardly every home. He and his wife are considering divorcing when their daughter finishes high school.

Neither of them particularly want their mother’s apartment, but they don’t want to deal with it either while they’d still have to go on paying the land taxes until it’s sold if their mother were to die. They’re also now responsible for paying the storage fees at the temple where their mother had interred their father’s ashes, though in her diary she states that she wants their ashes scattered at sea together. The request baffles the boys who aren’t quite sure why she wanted that or what sea she means before deciding it’s probably where they used to go holiday when they children, a once prosperous but now rundown resort area that seems to mimic their own sense of lonely despair. It seems that their mother wanted to return to a time when the family was at its happiest, while in the present day each has become mired in their own sorrow and insecurity. Though in some ways it may seem as if Yoshio is able to heal a rift through his fake marriage subterfuge, it cannot in the repair his family nor can the family really save any of them. Nevertheless, there is a vague sense of hope amid bleakness as the Yoshio returns to say goodbye to his mother with Maki still waiting at the train station rather than leaving alone.

Ranshima Bound screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (English subtitles)

BFI London Film Festival Confirms Complete Programme for 2026

Posted on by

The BFI London Film Festival returns to cinemas across the city 7th to 18th October. East Asian highlights include the latest from Hirokazu Koreeda, Lee Chang-dong, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi as well as big budget blockbuster Godzilla Minus Zero.

China

  • Atlantic Rhapsody – Surreal drama in which a man sets out to find his estranged father.
  • A Girl Unknown – Drama following a young woman taken away from her mother and sent to the country as a child.

Hong Kong

Japan

  • All of a Sudden – Latest from Ryusuke Hamaguchi following a French woman running a nursing home and a Japanese theatre director who has cancer.
  • Godzilla Minus Zero – Sequel to Takashi Yamazaki’s 2023 Godzilla movie.
  • Look Back – Latest from Hirokazu Koreeda following the friendship of two women.
  • Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing – Documentary about sumo wrestling.

Myanmar

Philippines

  • Filipiñana – Drama following a young woman working at a Manila golf club.
  • Moonglow – A conflicted policewoman is placed in charge of investigating a crime that she herself committed in Isabel Sandoval’s moody noir. Review.

South Korea

  • Easter – Documentary following a trans burlesque star.
  • Possible Love – Latest from Lee Chang-dong exploring a clash between a filmmaker making a documentary about workers who’ve been made redundant and her subjects.

Thailand

  • 9 Temples to Heaven – A grandmother embarks on a nine-temple pilgrimage with her children and grandchildren.
  • Inherit – Psychological horror in which a wealthy family is infiltrated by a suspiciously youthful grandmother.

Vietnam

  • Hearing – A sound technician notices sonic tensions in the world around him.

The BFI London Film Festival takes place at various venues across the city from 7th to 18th October 2024. Full details for all the films as well as screening times and ticketing information are available via the official website. You can also keep up to date with all the latest news via the festival’s Facebook page, Instagram, and YouTube channels.

My Name (내 이름은, Chung Ji-young, 2026)

Posted on by

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)

Posted on by

“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)

Posted on by

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)

Posted on by

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]

Posted on by

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.

Take Off (飞行家, Pengfei, 2025)

Posted on by

A young man’s dreams of flight are stamped out by a harsh reality only to be rekindled by a looming crisis in Pengfei’s warmhearted drama, Take Off (飞行家, fēixíngyuán). Beginning in the late 1970s and ending with a coda set in the present day, on one level at least the film attempts to chart the course of an ordinary man’s life through the tumultuous years of China’s economic and societal transformation in the late 20th century.

Viewed as something of an eccentric, Li Mingqi (Jiang Qimin), like his father before him, is obsessed with testing parachutes and the idea of breaking the record for the world’s highest jump. During the Cultural Revolution, Mingqi’s father was criticised for conducting unauthorised experiments, refused re-education, and was killed during his final, failed test flight. Mingqi’s fatherlessness and problematic background might explain why he is still an ordinary factory worker despite his obvious talent for engineering and has to conduct his experiments independently and in secret. Nevertheless, when given an ultimatum by his future father-in-law, Mingqi agrees to give up the parachute flights in order to marry his steadfast fiancée Yufeng (Li Xueqin).

In someways, Mingqi’s philosophy might be seen as subversive. He says that flying higher gives you a different perspective that changes the way you think and that by changing your thinking, the world around you also changes. China is already changing around Mingqi who remains more firmly grounded but continues to experiment with jetpacks in secret. Mingqi’s desire for success through his inventions is contrasted with that if Yufeng’s brother Xuguang (Dong Baoshi) who is forever studying to get into university for a better life outside the factory system and their small-town environment. When he’s injured by one of Mingqi’s experiments;, he begins to hold him responsible for his own ruined dreams while Mingqi also gives up his hopes of powered flight and further grounds his expectations. 

But this decision to give up his dreams slowly starts to eat away at him even as the nation begins to move away from the planned economy towards a more capitalistic society. Mingqi and Yufeng open a dance hall as a “public-private” partnership in conjunction with the local factory and using donations from other factory workers who are supportive of their ambitions. Mingqi fills the place with various contraptions such as a novel system of delivering beer by machine, but after his jetpack is ridiculed by visiting foreign tech investors he begins to enter a depressive funk. A few years later the contraptions no longer work. Mingqi has taken to drink and gambling while the business founders as the factories begin to close and workers either leave the area in search of work, like Mingqi succumb to gambling, or simply have no money to spend on entertainment.

Xuguang too eventually returns from Beijing hiding the fact that he has failed in business amid the boom and bust economics of the day. He’s brought with him a “best friend” with whom he seems to have an unusually close, potentially queer coded connection, though Yufeng is right not to trust Dezeng (Dong Zijian) who turns out to be among the breed of amoral capitalists rising in conjunction with the economic reforms. Presumably having failed in someway himself if he’s bothering with this moribund factory town, Dezeng steals the dance hall out from under Mingqi’s feet by exploiting local workers’ desperation and then sells it to open a revolving restaurant at the top of a nearby tower designed for an economic elite which may not yet exist in this area.

The implication seems to be that increasing capitalism has poisoned Mingqi’s idealism, leaving him a broken shadow of a man who no longer has a reason to live now that he’s given up him dreams, but it’s better to live like this than be a man like Dezeng. A family crisis gives him the opportunity to rekindle his dreams by vowing to win a TV competition by jumping from Dezeng’s tower and landing at a spot a few kilometres away in return for a cash prize. Watched live on television, Mingqi’s attempt to fly becomes that of every other disenfranchised worker cast adrift by the 90s reforms as if giving them permission to stand tall and chase their dreams. It would not have been possible, however, without Yufeng’s support. She never wanted him to stop inventing things, just to be a bit more mindful of safety, and is happy to be reunited with the man she married. While the final message may seem contradictory, simultaneously encouraging the idea of dreaming big while emphasising solidarity, it is heartfelt and is clear in its advocation for the liberating power of dreams.  

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

Trailer (Simplified Chinese subtitles only)