Tag: 2025

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)

Take Off (飞行家, Pengfei, 2025)

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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)

Gamer Girls (電競女孩, Sophie Yang & Veronica Bassetto, 2025)

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Losers never win again, according to some in Sophie Yang & Veronica Bassetto’s e-sports dramedy Gamer Girls (電競女孩). Now in her mid-20s, Summer (Angela Yuen Lai-Lam) gave up her e-sports career after a defeat, disbanding her team, and going back to school to get a regular corporate job instead. But somehow she can’t quite settle into the conventional life her boyfriend and family want for her. Still seeing the world like a video game, she dreams of winning e-sports glory once again but faces several barriers from ingrained societal misogyny to ageism and workplace exploitation.

Indeed, it seems that part of the reason the team broke up was the unreasonable expectations of their manager, Ms. Chiu (Cheuk Wan-chi), who now works for the Hong Kong e-Sports Chamber of Commerce. Another reason seems to have been conflict between team captain Summer and fellow player Lilith (Alma Kwok) who became frustrated with what she saw as Summer’s unilateral decision making and inability to take her teammates’ thoughts and feelings into account. Raven (Sabrina Cheung), meanwhile, still resents Summer for abruptly selling out by abandoning them to take a more conventional path despite having promised to carry on playing games together forever.

To that extent, the film seems to be another in a recent line exploring young people’s sense of dissatisfaction with the working environments their parents have railroaded them towards all their lives. Given the economic pressures of the contemporary society in which things like buying a flat and starting a family are out of reach for most, many feel that it’s no longer worth the sacrifice of long hours spent in an office doing a job that probably doesn’t interest them for so little reward. Instead they favour less conventional lifestyles that offer more freedom even if it comes at the cost of economic stability. Summer feels embarrassed around her family having insisted that e-sports could be “a real job” only to end up working in an office anyway, but still isn’t really ready to commit fully to the conventionality being imposed on her not least by her handsome and kind boyfriend who nevertheless can’t understand any other way of living and thinks her decision to quit her job is an act of madness.

But at the same time, it’s clear that she’s fighting an uphill battle in the e-sports world where male players refuse to accept that girls could be real gamers, instead branding them “gamer whores” who are are only there as eye candy to trick men into buying things they don’t need. Ms. Chiu makes it clear that Summer blew her chance and she doesn’t want to work with her as a gamer because losers never win again, but would be willing to collaborate with her in business terms which aren’t so much different from her own job. Summer’s escape from the corporate life is in that way also being swallowed by it as big business seeks to control the world e-sports through things like licensing and sponsorships.

The fact that the Gamer Girls rebel by setting up their own local community tournament in Lilith’s family-run cha chaan teng could also be seen as their desire to defend traditional Hong Kong culture against oppressive external forces. Whatever else happens, the cha chaan teng will still be here, one says as they root themselves more firmly in a local community filled with people who just want to play and not have to deal with any of the corporate rubbish that stands in the way. There is a kind of naivety involved in Summer’s certainty that it’ll be alright despite being warned several times that they don’t have licences to use the games in this way and the only reason they haven’t been shut down yet is because the companies are turning a blind eye. When Ms. Chiu feels threatened and decides to act, the swift deletion of everyone’s accounts, along with years of gaming history, reminds them that their world could be taken away from them just like that.

But their response is one of mutual solidarity, committing to rebuilding and defending the community they have created in the cha chaan teng and competing on their own terms. Even Summer’s online friend Login (Chase Chan Chung Chak) who was “banned for life” after protesting exploitative employment practices in professional e-sports begins to realise that nothing actually prevents him from just playing the game aside from his own sense of disappointment. Which is to say, they took their world back, if only to an extent in that they are still at the mercy of those who own the games and their in-game successes are only ever fantasy projections of battles unwon in their offline lives. Nevertheless, have at least decided to play on their own terms valuing sportsmanship and community over corporate success.

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

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

The Mutation (사랑의 탄생, Shin Su-won, 2025) [Fantasia 2026)

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Two people largely excluded from mainstream society bond over a shared sense of loss and loneliness in Shin Su-won’s lighthearted road trip movie, The Mutation (사랑의 탄생). Though the English-language title may sound a little harsh, hinting at some kind of science fiction dystopia, the film is in other ways as the Korean title “The Birth of Love,” implies about self-acceptance and mutual solidarity among those that society has continues to other and reject.

The Korean title is quoted in each of the lives of the protagonists, Se-oh (Han Hyun-min), a man with dark skin who was born to two Korean parents, and Sora (Lee Zoo-young), a gay woman whose former partner took her own life after being pressured into a heteronormative marriage by her conservative mother. Se-oh has been rejected by his family as his father refuses to accept him as his son despite his mother’s assurance that she has remained faithful him. He tries asking an old friend of his mother’s for answers, but she tells him that what matters is only that he was born from love. Sora, meanwhile, discovers a letter written by her late partner Min-ji as a omechild that she titled “the birth of love” and recorded her growing feelings for a female classmate along with the fear that her parents would find out.

Sora’s difference is not visibly obvious in the way that Se-oh’s is, but she still finds that she is excluded from mainstream society. She says that she makes tables because they’re something to be shared rather than used selfishly, but it seems that few people are willing to come to hers despite her instructions to Se-oh that if he got a bigger table for his apartment people would soon come to sit around it. It does however signal her own openness and desire for connection, even if that desire is often rejected or goes unmet. After agreeing to accompany Se-oh on his trip, she too has somewhere she does not have the courage to go alone. On returning to the town where Min-ji lived, she discovers her mother being hassled in the market by a group of religious people who appear to be aware of exactly how her daughter died and why but berate her for not raising her “better”. Min-ji’s mother had thought that if she married, Min-ji would settle down and live a “normal” life, but in the end Min-ji could not live that way. Her mother is now filled with regrets wishing she had accepted her daughter for who she was despite what others may have said in their small and conservative town where the local pastor holds sway.

Min-ji’s mother did not tell Sora of her death for some time nor did she invite her to the funeral, hoping that no one would find out. Se-oh wasn’t invited to his mother’s funeral either and his name is conspicuously absent from the list of official mourners at the funeral hall. He is continually treated as an outsider as strangers automatically address him in English. It never occurs to them to someone who looks like him may have been born and raised in Korea and know no other language, and as such they reject his Koreanness. This has also meant that he has struggled to find employment and has been restricted to doing a series of precarious casual labour jobs, the latest of which is ironically playing the white tiger at a local amusement park. People like me better when I wear a mask, he says, which perhaps something Sora can also understand.

But she also says that Min-ji was the only person she ever knew who didn’t wear one, implying that it may not be possible to survive in this society as an authentic person without some kind of boundary between oneself and others. Nevertheless, through their gentle road trip, the pair begin to come to terms with the past and also with themselves in gaining a level of self-acceptance that allows them to move forward, together or apart. Warm and gentle in spirit, the film makes the most of its idyllic country settings while focusing on the simple power of human connection in the face of a world that can often be harsh and unforgiving of those it perceives to be somehow other.

The Mutation screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish (我未許願先吹蠟燭, Chao Koi Wang & Hu Chin-Yen, 2025)

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“Money can’t solve everything,” according to Jojo’s teacher, but life without it is certainly very difficult in Chao Koi-Wang and Hu Chin-Yen’s heartwarming drama I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish. The film’s title perhaps bears out the sense of disappointment and futility among those trapped on the margins of contemporary Macanese society where life is one great crap shoot and the only way out of their straitened circumstances is to win big at one of the area’s famous casinos. 

But as recently released ex-offender Hua points out, there are wins and losses in gambling and more often than not they lost. Jojo is living with her elderly grandmother following her parents’ divorce and father’s disappearance after fleeing to avoid loan sharks who now pester them for their money. Jojo’s father told her he was scammed by his business partner, but her grandmother suggests it was down to a gambling problem. It’s ironic then that Jojo’s proposed solution is to use an insanely large number of “dead chips”, those that can’t be cashed in but can be used to place bets, to get rich quick and pay off her father’s debts so he can come and the family can live in a comfortable environment. The only snag is that, thankfully, they don’t yet let small children enter casinos.

While it’s clear that everyone seems to be feeling a sense of desperation, there are also those who help others such as the landlord that lets Jojo’s grandmother rent a makeshift rooftop apartment cheaply while even the evil loan shark turns out to have a compassionate side. Nevertheless, Jojo’s attempts to lean on adults for help largely fail, beginning with her hypocritical teacher who criticises gambling but agrees to help her then pockets the money for himself telling her he lost it all. He’s later seen looking in an estate agent’s window with his girlfriend, implying he wanted the money to buy a flat because, realistically speaking, there’s no way he could do that on a teacher’s salary and without the means to own property things like marriage and a domestic life also become more difficult. 

Hua, who came to Macau from Taiwan for love, also believes his economic situation caused the breakdown of his marriage and is desperate to win his wife back. Fearful she’d leave him, he committed a scam to buy a flat she moved out of when he went to jail. He’s now renting it out to a collection of migrant workers like himself to cover the mortgage while working as a debt collector. Yet he too is touched by Jojo’s plight and agrees to help her, though even he is tempted by the idea of scamming her out of her all money. Perhaps he sympathises with her because they are both in effect waiting for someone who likely won’t return, he his wife and she her father. As such, they form a kind of familial bond with Hua trying to take care of Jojo and her grandmother while keeping half an eye on the prospect of paying off his mortgage. 

On the other hand, it says something about societal indifference that Jojo goes on living on her own while her grandmother’s in hospital and their electricity has been cut off because she’s not around to pay the bill. They need someone to sign a consent form so her grandmother can have surgery, but there don’t appear to be any other responsible adults in Jojo’s life. An attempt to ask her mother, who has remarried and has a new family, proves more traumatic than anything else. No one except the loan sharks appears to check in her at all. She is resourceful and proactive, but also still a child and largely unable to understand the long-term implications of her plan or that gambling is a dangerous habit that, as Hua says, can ruin lives.

In that way the film is subtly critical of Macau’s economic dependence on the casino industry and the wealthy inequality that comes along with it. Jojo is only a little bit worried about the owner of the chips coming back for them, while Hua suggests they have belonged to someone so rich they probably just forgot about it. Gambling is something rich people do he says, and after all you can only really do it responsibly by playing with money you can afford to lose which neither of them have. Still, they keep rolling the dice anyway, hoping that their numbers will come up. Grandma may try to caution them, revealing a mistake she made in her own youth born of fear and desperation, that greed will always come back to bit you, but there is at least a sense of tempered optimism in their mantra of “lose today, win tomorrow,” that keeps hope alive when all else seems bleak.

I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Tradition Chinese / English subtitles)

Deep Quiet Room (深度安靜, Shen Ko-shang, 2025)

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Reeling after his wife’s unexpected suicide, a bereft husband begins to discover the destructive effects of unresolved trauma amid the oppressive patriarchal social system of Taiwanese society in Shen Ko-shang’s hard-hitting drama, Deep Quiet Room (深度安靜, shēndù ānjìng). The “deep quiet room” of the title is both literal in referring to that at the back of the couple’s flat they had designated as a nursery where pregnant wife Yu-ting cocoons herself, and to the psychological space into which her husband cannot enter.

Told from Yu-Ming’s (Joseph Chang) perspective, the film centres on his sense of confusion and inability to understand the psychological changes that his wife underwent following her pregnancy which led to her taking her own life. Through repeated flashbacks, it becomes clear that Yu-Ting (Ariel Lin) was suffering from depression and uncertain whether she wanted to give birth to this child. Though everything may have seemed normal on the surface, we can see that there is something not quite right in the way that Yu-Ting interacts with her parents while cryptic allusions are made to two other sisters who are for some reason no longer part of the family while Yu-Ting’s mother is otherwise an entirely silent and passive presence.

This silence and passivity may stand in for that of Taiwanese women, or least those of her generation, who find themselves powerless against male authority figures such as husbands and fathers. When Yu-Ting expresses anxiety that their baby may be a girl, Yu-Ming assumes that his overbearing mother has said something to her reflecting a cultural bias that favours sons over daughters. Yu-Ming appears to not to share it while the doctors at the hospital also stress that the sex is irrelevant as long as the child is healthy. But when Yu-Ting’s father (Chin Shih-chieh) states that girls are better, there is something uniquely chilling in his words that further deepens Yu-Ting’s dread and sense of responsibility in bringing a little girl into this kind of world.

The father cannot be questioned and his home is filled with silence. This is the deep quiet room in which the film seems to suggest all Taiwanese women are to one degree or another trapped inside. Yu-Ming necessarily exists on the other side of it and is to some extent unaware of its existence. He is frustrated that his wife shuts him out and desperately wants to her to share with him what it is that makes her so unhappy and prevents her from embracing the kind of domestic happiness that he is seeking to create. When Yu-Ting unexpectedly snaps that she hates herself for being unable to abandon her father, Yu-Ming seems bemused and replies that it’s a daughter’s filial duty to care for him. His own decision, which seems odd to others, to continue caring for Yu-Ting’s father, who has dementia and therefore can no longer answer for whatever he may have done in the past, is another symptom of his desire to maintain this ideal of a traditional family. 

What he discovers therefore implodes Yu-Ming’s conception of the values that he assumed underpinned his society and his own role within them. His eventual decision to abandon Yu-Ting’s father is symbolic of an ultimate desire to reject and escape from this patriarchal superstructure of which he has also been a part. Yu-Ting’s two sisters chose other paths to escaping their trauma, the oldest spending most of her adult life in a psychiatric institution, and the younger fleeing abroad severing all ties with her family. She has married a man who is not Taiwanese and is living a happy family life overseas. Informed of her mother and sister’s deaths, she simply replies “R.I.P” and that it’s no longer any concern of hers. She has sealed her childhood off in its own deep quiet room and now refuses to open the door, suggesting that the only path to survival lies in exiting this system entirely and never looking back.

As such Shen paints a fairly bleak view of the contemporary society as mired in outdated patriarchal social codes while women like Yu-Ting are left with no recourse. She cannot share this part of herself even with those close to her, not even with her sisters who suffered the same way she did but have each withdrawn themselves into different kinds of isolation, and must therefore carry the burden alone. There is however a glimmer of light in the otherwise grim conclusion that suggests a desire at least to exorcise this trauma by abandoning the patriarchal order and building something new in its place.

Deep Quiet Room screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Last Night in Taipei (明日的過客, Kuo Cheng-chui, 2025)

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Three old friends who haven’t seen each other in years are forced to confront the reality of their lives after a chance encounter in Kuo Cheng-chui’s Last Night in Taipei (明日的過客, míngrì dì guòkè). Less an odyssey through the midnight city, the film is really more about finding accommodation with a sense of middle-aged regret and letting go of what might have been, though it does not necessarily seem that any of them are really happier after dealing with their unresolved feelings.

Blanche’s marriage has begun to turn cold owing to her husband’s deference to his mother who is upset that they have yet to conceive a child and continually dropping off Chinese medicine to help them along. After arguing with her husband Ben when a date night is abruptly cancelled she decides to stay in the city alone where she immediately runs into an ex, Jake, who is on a trip home from Paris where he as lived for the last few years. To begin with, it isn’t quite clear whether Blanche has actually met him at all or is just fantasising about what her life would be like if she’d stayed with him rather than ending up Ben whose chief advantage seems to be his wealth.

But Jake is similarly feeling lost in that he feels out of place in both Paris and Taipei and is perceived as a foreigner in both places. Meanwhile, he’s harbouring unresolved feelings about the end of his relationship with Blanche. While wandering though the city, the pair walk into a bar where their old friend Axin is currently working. His current girlfriend, Mao Mao, later joins them, but their relationship is not all it seems as Mao Mao essentially hired Axin to play the part of her boyfriend for 99 days to make an ex jealous and is now having difficulty dealing with the end of the arrangement.

The trio met when they were all aspiring actors, and they have to one extent or another each failed to fulfil their dreams. Only Axin is seriously persevering with performing, but he to is coming to the conclusion that he has failed as an actor and it’s time for him to leave Taipei. Blanche, too, regrets not having had the opportunity to play a proper role and is feeling unsatisfied with her married life. She wonders if this is all there really is and her entire life is already decided. Perhaps she only stays with Ben because it’s become convenient while the risks of leaving outweigh the benefits. Jake too always felt as if Taiwan was a liminal space, not somewhere he’d stay indefinitely, so he never put down roots. He reflects how much the city has changed, almost if it did so deliberately to give them memories as these spaces seem to retreat from them back into the past. 

The frequent references to missiles and intrusions into their airspace echo this sense of restless anxiety that this current existence might soon disappear or be taken from them. The sense of impending doom forces the three friends to reassess their bonds and missed connections providing an opportunity for at least partial emotional honesty even if these unresolved feelings are not fully addressed. Mao Mao too must reevaluate what she was looking for in her relationship with Axin in which he too was perhaps merely putting off the act of confronting himself and his life.

Though they may each discover a way of moving forward, no one seems all that happy about it. Blanche considers leaving her marriage, but ultimately stays perhaps because she lacks the courage to actually do it and resigns herself to an unfulfilling future. Jake still feels adrift and blames himself for the failure of his relationship with Blanche, realising that he let her down out of fear and immaturity. Axin too decides to move on, but is left with a sense of regret, while Mao Mao too can only resolve to start over again from day one. In some ways the friendship between them might have been repaired with the air cleared, but on the other hand as Axin says real friends don’t necessarily need to be in contact all the time and each seems to be left a little lonelier even than before in having closed a door to the past with seemingly none to open to the future.

Last Night in Taipei screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (dialogue free)

White Flowers and Fruits (白の花実, Yukari Sakamoto, 2025)

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The abrupt suicide of a young woman at a protestant Christian boarding school causes those around her to reassess their reality in Yukari Sakamoto’s poetic drama White Flowers and Fruits (白の花実, Shiro no Kajitsu). Perhaps done a disservice by the literalness of its English language title, the film is on one level as the Japanese title implies about the disconnect between form and content, or the extent to which we project ourselves onto others and see only what we want or expect to see.

Anna (Miro) is someone who says she can see “what others can’t”. This most obviously refers to her ability to see ghosts, though of course we can’t be sure whether she is telling the truth or hallucinating reflections of her own anxieties. In any case, she has a rebellious streak which is why her mother has transferred her to a Christian boarding school. “It’s your last chance,” she tells her, implying that Anna has already been expelled from several other institutions for her refusal to conform. Anna, however, promptly discovers an angry ghost hovering directly behind her new roommate Rika (Nico Aoto) and thereafter refuses to the “pointless” rules of the school including wearing her ribbon necktie.

She and “lovely” Rika are then contrasted as model student and its reverse. It’s Rika who remarks that being at odds with everyone all the time must be exhausting and her life might be easier if she made more of an effort to get along with people, but Anna claims that she is simply unlike Rika and this is something she is unable to do even if she wanted to. “Why don’t you try being me?” Rika asks after putting her own ribbon around Anna’s neck, as if she were lifting a burden from herself and placing it onto Anna in a moment of forced conformity if also a well-meaning rather than oppressive gesture. When Rika takes her own life by jumping from the bell tower not long after, it provokes a degree of soul-searching among everyone at the school but most especially Anna and Rika’s best friend Shiori (Anji Ikehata).

After reading Rika’s diary, Anna begins seeing a blue orb she believes to be Rika’s spirit which eventually settles in her chest and begins to alter her personality to become a little more malleable and conformist as expressed by the Edwardian-style high collars of her uniform and newly deferent personality. It’s never quite clear if this is “real”, Anna’s delusion, a manifestation of her attempt to come to terms with grief, or deliberate subterfuge as she begins to develop a friendship with Shiori in part based on the notion that she has been possessed by Rika. The pair are both trying in one sense to get a handle on the sides of Rika that they didn’t have access to in order to understand why she died. 

But Rika’s diary is full of insecurity. She feels herself under pressure training to train for the school’s traditional dance show and is paranoid that she makes those around her worry when she doesn’t perform well enough. The dance itself is strangely sensual and witchy, earthy and rooted in nature in contrast to the religious setting of the school. On reading the diary, Shiori realises that shortly before she died Rika tried to confess her feelings for her, but Shiori simply didn’t understand and worries this accidental and insensitive rejection may have contributed to her desire to take her own life. It is not especially the religiosity of the school that is repressive, however, so much so as the enforced conformity of their social class. 

Aside from their association with “Class S” lesbian romance literature, these kinds of boarding schools are associated most closely with upper-class women who are being trained to become wives of important men. As such it is important that they learn to be, unlike Anna, meek and obedient. On a return home, Shiori attends a dinner party at which only her sister is dressed in red and seated across from a man to whom she has evidently been betrothed for an arranged marriage. Shiori is mildly horrified, but her sister just seems to stare on vacantly as if resigned to her fate. But it’s also this image of properness that may have prevented Rika getting the help she needed before she died as her animosity towards her family and fear of her father were ignored because of their social standing. Rika’s apparently distraught father is determined to retrieve the diary presumably because he fears what might be written inside it. Rika’s role as a model student might then have been a persona that marked her attachment to alternate familial home and a desire to escape sexual abuse at the hands of her father.

A video is leaked showing a young girl smoking in one of the school’s bedrooms with many believing it to be Rika, though it isn’t really clear who is it just as it is often unclear whether Anna is Rika or a version of herself. A final moment of rebellion, Anna challenges the enquiry into Rika’s death accusing them of using Rika’s death for their own ends to explore questions about themselves rather than directly confronting their own realities, though perhaps this is what she too has been doing. In an ironic way, it’s through letting Rika go that Anna and Shiori are able to move forward with their lives, but in other ways they take her with them as if she really had settled somewhere in Anna’s chest. Anna has learned how to dance for herself and come to some kind of accommodation with the world, while Shiori has been presented with a picture of herself that is also a picture of Rika in its reflected gaze. Sakamoto leans into J-horror territory in capturing the gothic atmosphere of the school, though as Anna later says, the ghosts themselves are not really frightening so much as an expression of that which remains unknown an acceptance of which defines adult enlightenment.

White Flowers and Fruits screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (no subtitles)