Tag: 2025

Human Resource (Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, 2025)

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Fren (Prapamonton Eiamchan) has been having trouble sleeping. The doctor she visits to confirm her pregnancy tells her that she’ll have to stop taking her sleeping tablets, but to try gentle exercise such as walking on a treadmill instead. But Fren’s whole life is walking on a treadmill. The reason that she can’t sleep is that she works in HR for a terrible company and is knowingly bringing people into this world of cruelty and exploitation. She doesn’t really want to do the same for her baby, which is one reason she hasn’t told her husband Thame (Paopetch Charoensook) about the pregnancy even though they’ve been trying for two years.

Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s Human Resources paints a fairly bleak picture of contemporary Thailand which is all the more chilling for its seeming normality. Fren listens to radio hosts talk about how the economy is tanking, there are floods in the north and no one’s doing anything about it, and also apples might be full of microplastics. You should also fit a filter in your shower because there’s cadmium in the water despite the government’s assurances that it’s safe. No wonder everyone feels on edge. Fren is increasingly uncomfortable with her own complicity, but sees no real way around it.

The main problem is that she works for a bully for who demands an apology from her when she has to have a word with him about his workplace behaviour which includes throwing piles of paper in the face of employees. June hasn’t been coming to work, and according to Fren’s colleague Tenn (Chanakan Rattana-Udom), a few other employees quit their jobs like this too because they just couldn’t live this way any more. Between Jak’s rages, low wages, and the demand to work six days a week, they know they can’t keep staff and feel bad about trying to recruit people. Tenn laments that given the economy, someone will desperate enough to bite, while the pair of them make themselves feel better by deciding to be upfront in interviews about the working culture and letting the candidates decide for themselves.

But how much do you really get to decide? When Thame finds out about the pregnancy, the couple to go look around an expensive international school. Fren agrees that’s very nice and the children seem happy, but it wasn’t their choice to be here and no one’s ever asked them if their parents’ idea of a “decent” person is what they really want to be. To Fren, the international school seems like another level of complicity in perpetuating the inequality in society that’s fuelling the violence and resentment all around them. The candidates might not have the option of turning down these jobs, and Fren doesn’t really have the option to leave, either. But Tenn comes from money and he could always get a job at his family’s company, so in the end only he has the choice of whether to stay or go.

Lectures Fren attends talk about the working revolution and the threat of AI, insisting that the “average” worker is dead because those jobs are gone, so the only way to make a mark is to work yourself to death and make use of personal connections. That seems to be the route Thame is taking after becoming chummy with the police chief in the hope of selling him some of their ultra thin stab vests that are comfortable to wear all day long as if implying the world has already got to that point that you need to be wearing armour at all times. He has a worryingly authoritarian streak and is incensed by the moped drivers who keep going the wrong way up their one-way street. Thame refuses to back up and let them pass, though isn’t so brave when one of them jumps off his bike and begins pounding the windscreen with his helmet. Humiliated by his inability to combat this kind of violence despite having brought it on himself, Thame later runs the guy over deliberately and then gets the police chief to make it go away. 

Meanwhile, Fren feels as if all she can do is carry on walking the treadmill. The shutter at the car wash comes to symbolise that of the furnace at the crematorium where a colleague who took their own life because of overwork and bullying was laid to rest as if Fren’s life were a kind of living death. A famous woman convicted of a crime reveals she’s had an abortion because she didn’t want her son to be born in prison or to bring a child into that world. Fren isn’t sure she wants to either, but like everything else, she might not have much choice.

Human Resource screens as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

No Parking (주차금지, Son Hyeon-woo, 2025)

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A small negligence can come back to bite you, according to the violent stalker at the centre of Son Hyeon-woo’s No Parking (주차금지, Juchageumji). Ho-jun (Kim Roi-ha) likes to punish the “rude”, though some might like to argue that whacking people with wrenches is also at the very least impolite, while his overall manner is distinctly unfriendly. It is, however, inconsiderate parking practices that eventually do for him when he becomes fixated on a neighbour of his wife’s who asks him to move her car while he’s in the process of murdering her. 

Yeon-hee (Ryu Hyun-kyung) was already fed up with the parking situation and has been trying to move though is struggling to do so for a variety of reasons. There’s a lot going on in her life, including a recent divorce and starting again after returning to Korea and the workforce after a 10-year absence. That’s perhaps why she’s stuck in a contract worker position which means she won’t be approved for the loan she needs for a lease on another property until she’s made a full-time employee. But, as someone suggests to her, her boss may have had an ulterior motive for offering her the job and, sure enough, begins sexually harassing her immediately after her welcome party. 

Hae-cheol (Kim Jang-won) and Ho-jun are both, in their ways, representatives of the patriarchal society. They both berate Yeon-hee for being “rude” to them, and react angrily when they feel disrespected. Hae-cheol is in fact already married with children, and repeatedly stresses his secure financial position and assets he insists would be Yeon-hee’s if she came over to him. He later describes his wife as a “fat pig” and moans that she let herself go after the marriage and children. “Yeon-hee needs to meet a guy like me,” he says, while refusing to take her refusal seriously. She asks him why he’s doing this to her and says that she’s going to quit her job, but that doesn’t stop him wandering around outside her home and declaring he’ll stay there until she comes out. 

Ho-jun hangs around outside her house too, though unfortunately, you can’t report someone to the police for loitering. He gets her name from a business card she’s left in the window of her car, which seems ill-advised, but he obviously knows where she lives anyway. He insists on having an apology for her having been “rude” to him when she asked him to move the car, though as she points out, it was “rude” not to park it properly and in any case she’s at the end of her tether with the traffic, her work situation, and precarious living conditions. Nevertheless, Ho-jun’s attitude is reflective of a wider misogyny in which he expects subservience from women and becomes violent when he doesn’t get it. He’s evidently been stalking his ex-wife and murders her on realising that she’s found another man. 

Yet Ho-jun also resents Hae-cheol, insisting that it’s because of men like him that women have become “arrogant”. Hae-cheol too expects Yeon-hee’s deference and repeatedly stresses that he’s a nice guy and can’t understand why she’s treating him this way. He doesn’t leave her any room to refuse and rejects her right to choose. Like Ho-jun, he fixates on her “rudeness” in not stopping to say goodbye to him when she was trying to leave work after realising he lured her there on false pretences at the weekend when no one else’s around so he could pressure her into going to dinner. He describes her as a “gift” from the universe to cure his loneliness, complaining that his family don’t care about him because he prioritised work and now has no emotional outlets. He repeatedly drops hints about making Yeon-hee full-time, while misusing his power and suggesting that doing so is contingent on her agreeing to the affair with him. Nevertheless, when rumours spread around the office it’s Yeon-hee who gets suspended even though none of it is true and it was Hae-cheol who was harassing her.

The film seems to suggest it’s this general level of frustration and anger with the contemporary society that leads to acts of violence over things which might be thought “trivial” such as parking provision, but then again inconsiderate parking is also a sign of selfishness or at least that everyone is so consumed by their own problems that they don’t have time to consider the effects of their actions on others. Or, maybe some people are just rude or like Ho-jun trying to assert their dominance by flouting the rules. In any case, small acts of negligence may indeed come back to strike you from unelected directions and the only real cure is to try to treat other people as people who are also tired and frustrated but whose lives would be made infinitely easier if people didn’t keep parking in front of their driveways.

Trailer (Korean subtitles only)

Exit 8 (８番出口, Genki Kawamura, 2025)

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Shinjuku Station is notoriously difficult to escape. The endless labyrinthine corridors all look the same, lending the environment a degree of surreality that leaves you feeling anxious that actually you’re making no progress at all merely walking in circles and may do so until you die. It becomes a more literal hellscape for one “lost man” in Genki Kawamura’s elliptical adaptation of the popular video game in which the hero finds himself trapped in the same looping corridor where he is told he must turn back if he spots anything that isn’t as it should be and that he should do this eight times so that he can reach Exit 8 (８番出口, Hachiban Deguchi) and leave the station.

The figure 8 is an ellipsis in itself while simultaneously recalling the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism in which one must complete the eight steps to find Nirvana and escape the painful cycle of life and rebirth. It’s birth that most occupies the Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya) as, shortly before he enters the tunnel, he receives a call from the girlfriend (Nana Komatsu) he’s just broken up with telling him she’s pregnant. She says knows he always had an anxiety about becoming a father, but wants to know what he wants to do. Kawamura films this opening sequence in POV, at once recalling the film’s video game origins and placing us directly into this world in which we feel the Lost Man’s shock and disorientation as he stops suddenly and staggers while the world carries on around him. 

The tunnel is then a manifestation of his mental destabilisation as he tries to process impending fatherhood and make a decision about whether or not he wants this child. This is to an extent reflected in his name in which he is both geographically and mentally “lost” while unable to reach a decision. Inside the tunnel, he’s told not to “overlook” anything that seems like an anomaly as if he were trying to remake the world and teach himself which is the right path to take. Though as his equally unnamed girlfriend says in a sequence that may be a fantasy, future echo, or fractured memory, no one can really know which path is right and life is a continual act of faith that we will not come to regret the decisions we have made or the ones we failed to make. 

This is most obvious when the Lost Man encounters a little boy with a scratch on his face in the tunnel and immediately decides he’s an anomaly, only to discover he isn’t when the counter resets to zero meaning he made the wrong decision and has to start again. The boy seems to be another person trapped in the loop, though not previously on the same cycle as the Lost Man, but at the same time he comes to represent both the son the Lost Man may have and himself as a little boy. Likewise, the Walking Man (Yamato Kochi) that he encounters also seems to become the father that Lost Man fears becoming, and the one he never met. While the Walking Man eventually abandons the boy on discovering what could be Exit 8 to make his own escape, the Lost Man refuses to do so and begins to come to an accommodation with his own role as a potential father as well a responsible member of society. 

In the opening sequence, he’d stood by and done nothing as an obnoxious salaryman laid into a mother holding her crying baby on the train, the only white-dressed figure on this funereal carriage filled with people dressed in back on their way to work. Another loopee asks the Walking Man if being trapped in this purgatorial hellscape is really any different than his life in which he repeats the same actions every day in the daily grind of the salaryman and it does seem as he is looking for an escape from the soul-destroying meaninglessness of the corporate life otherwise hinting at his own failed paternity and flight from domestic obligation. Meanwhile for the Lost Man, he fears he isn’t ready to become a father in part because he’s only a temp worker and hasn’t anchored himself safely enough within adulthood to be able to support a wife and child. Still, he resents himself for not having stood up for the woman and her baby in being cowed into submission by the paternal figure of the salaryman and the fear of putting his own head above the parapet by refusing to mind his own business like everyone else with their heads buried in their phones.

But then again, how could you ever really know that you’ve found the “real” Exit 8 and it’s not just another “anomaly” presented by the loop. Perhaps you never actually escaped this labyrinth, only ventured deeper inside it. Or perhaps, you escape the loop when it’s time for you to do so because your mind is clear and you know which path to take. There’s a minor irony in some the decor with the subway etiquette poster reading “are you alright?” while intending to ask the reader if they’re sure they’re behaving appropriately on public transport, but also hinting at the Lost Man’s failure to intervene and the Walking Man’s indifference to others. In any case, the tunnel has its hellishness and terror but it can also lead you where you’re supposed to go, if only you allow it.

Exit 8 screens 8/9th October as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Samurai Fury (室町無頼, Yu Irie, 2025)

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Retitled Samurai Fury (室町無頼, Muromachi Burai) for it’s US release, Yu Irie’s Muromachi Outsiders is indeed a tale of righteous anger though like many jidaigeki the rage is directed towards the corrupt samurai class and wielded by a ronin with a noble heart. Based on a novel by Ryosuke Kakine, it recounts a rebellion that took place five years before the Onin War that would lead to the end the Ashikaga Shogunate and initiate the Sengoku or warring states period that lasted until the Tokugawa era began. 

The cause is, really, the incompetent government of shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa (Aoi Nakamura) who is largely seen here gazing out at his view from the palace in Kyoto which he is obsessed with rebuilding. Meanwhile, famine has taken hold following a period of drought that ended with a typhoon and flooding of the river Kamo, and the starvation has also led to a plague. Between the lack of food and disease, 82,000 people will die, but the government doesn’t really do anything because they don’t think the lives of peasants are all that important. This is of course very shortsighted because someone has to plant all that rice that gets delivered to the palace and they can’t do that if they’re too busy starving to death. In the opening sequences, peasants are whipped and beaten as they transport a giant rock for the shogun’s new garden, though when it gets there he doesn’t like it. Meanwhile, a giant pile of bodies in approximately the same shape is dumped at the edge of the river where they’re burning the dead.

The farmers are forced to take such onerous jobs for extra money because they can’t produce enough to pay their taxes which the samurai keep putting up. To make up the shortfall, they have to take out loans from usurious monks who seize their property or take their wives and daughters when they can’t pay. A young man pressed into working for debt collectors from the temple is told to kill a man who owed them money but hits the barrel beside him instead and exposes him for keeping his seed grain without which he won’t be able to plant more rice but they’re going to take that anyway which means that in the end everyone is going to starve. A village favoured by the hero, Hyoe (Yo Oizumi), is also subject raids from disenfranchised ronin who’ve taken to banditry to survive. 

Hyoe is also a ronin, but in his life of wandering he’s found a kind of freedom even as he straddles an awkward line, sometimes working with an old friend from the same clan, Doken (Shinichi Tsutsumi), who has turned the other way and is now the security chief for the government in Kyoto with his own gang of bandit dent collectors. Hyoe’s role is, ostensibly, to stop peasant uprisings, which he does, but mostly because he knows they’re pointless and the farmers armed with little more than hoes and stolen armour will simply be massacred, but he’s also secretly plotting a giant rebellion of his own, harnassing the forces of the ronin and the fed up peasants to storm the capital, burn the debt agreements, and rescue the women taken in lieu of payment. 

But to do so means he’ll have to betray his oldest friend and that he likely won’t survive. Still he thinks someone’s got to do something about this rotten world and sees a better one beyond it if only they can throw off the yoke of the samurai class that thinks peasants are the same bugs to squeezed dry under their boots. That’s perhaps why he trains a young successor, knowing that can’t remake the world with just this one assault on the mechanisms of government and that even if they get rid of the drunken fool Lord Nawa (Kazuki Kitamura), someone not all that different will pop up in his place. “Tax is supposed to improve people lives,” one of the revolters screams at a young soldier, not pay for a new wing at the palace, though it’s a lesson the young shogun seems incapable of learning even as the city burns all around him. 

Taking a leaf out of The Betrayal’s book, the climax is a lengthy action sequence in which Hyoe’s apprentice Saizo (Kento Nagao) takes on half the Kyoto garrison single-handed armed only with his staff. Though the themes are common enough for jidaigeki, though in truth jidaigeki mainly refers to films set in the Edo era under the Tokugawa peace, Irie modernises the way battle is depicted to incorporate wuxia-style wirework and rooftop chases along with martial arts training sequences for the young Saizo who learns the way of the warrior from a cackling old man with a long white beard (Akira Emoto) who has also taken in a young Korean woman (Rina Takeda) who was sold to a brothel by her father in just another one of the injustices of the era but has now become a badass archer and another of Hyoe’s righteous avengers. Solidarity is it seems the best weapon, along with biding your time and knowing when to retreat because this is a war that’s never really won but only held back while the powers that be never really learn.

Samurai Fury is released Digitally in the US Oct. 7 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Man Who Failed to Die (死に損なった男, Seiji Tanaka, 2025)

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Feeling hopeless in his professional life and surrounded by a city of frustrated, angry people, comedy writer Ippei (Mizukawa Katamari) decides to end it all by throwing himself under the evening train, but as fate would have it, services are interrupted because of an incident at the previous station. Reconsidering his decision, he refunds his ticket and goes back to his life, but he soon finds himself haunted, in literal and figural senses, by the other person who died and, in some ways, ended up saving his life.

Like his earlier film Melancholic, Seiji Tanaka’s The Man Who Failed to Die (死に損なった男, Shini sokonatta otoko) is partly about the things we don’t see which in this case is that many people are struggling and have fallen into despair believing they have no one and nowhere to turn. Before he decides to die, Ippei is knocked over by a cyclist who curses at him for being in his way before riding on, while a woman out running has no option but to jump over him and then carries on her way. Later, he bumps into a man at the station who becomes angry and aggressive, ironically telling him that he should “fuck off and die”. The implication is that in this city everyone is so busy rushing about and overworked that it’s left them frazzled and impatient, overly focussed on the demands placed on them and unable to notice or reach out to others. 

It’s another minor irony that Ippei works in comedy which is supposed to entertain people, cheer them up, and relieve their stress, but it’s actually very hard work and incredibly competitive. When he returns after his failed attempt to die, he’s cornered by his manager and a comedian who is annoyed that she hasn’t been given as many lines as the men and feels she’s being discriminated against on the grounds of her gender. Ippei tries to explain that she’s got the punchlines and there are fewer of them because of the comedic rhythm, but it’s something that’s difficult to explain without performing the piece in front of an audience. He’s also been dumped by one of the groups he works with because they’ve chosen to go with a bigger producer who has better TV connections. The duo he’s working with now are struggling with some material that’s not really hitting home while preparing for a competition that’s only a couple of weeks away. Ippei suggests completely reworking the routine, but is obviously difficult for everyone and not least himself who’s going to have to come up with a killer idea in record time. 

Which is all to say he’s under a lot of stress, and if he did just hallucinate the ghost of the man who died in place of him, Tomohiro (Bokuzo Masana), that would be understandable. Tomohiro has unfinished business, and thinks that Ippei should take care of it for him seeing as he technically saved his life, but what he wants him to do is kill the abusive ex who’s started stalking his daughter again now the restraining order’s expired. The film sort of suggests that Wakamatsu (Yutaka Kyan) became violent because of these same stresses after losing his businesses during the pandemic, but nevertheless he’s a frightening and controlling presence while Aya (Erika Karata) is quite clearly terrified of him. Once again, when Ippei interrupts Wakamatsu in the street trying to force his way into Tomohiro’s house, another passerby picks up his dog and walks on without stopping to check if everything’s alright. Perhaps it’s fair enough that they didn’t want to get involved in a dangerous situation, but to speaks to the ongoing indifference of society in which few are willing step in and help women like Aya and men like Wakamatsu are allowed to go on bullying and tormenting those around them.

Getting involved in Tomohiro’s quest does however help Ippei to get a handle on his life and an acceptance that having failed to die he’s still here and has a chance to start again. He begins to realise that the reason he wanted to die was that although he had achieved his dreams of working in comedy, it all seemed quite meaningless and he’d lost sight of what took him there in the first place. Rather than contribute to the angry society around him, he resolves to be happy for other people’s successes and understand that even if someone appears to be successful it doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t struggling or in need of help too. Filled with a gentle absurdity and good humour, the film is despite its darker themes an argument for a little more compassion and solidarity in the face of the constant pressure of a fast-paced society.

The Man Who Failed to Die screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Good Luck (グッドラック, Shin Adachi, 2025)

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Taro’s (Hiroki Sano) problem as far as he sees it, is that he lacks self-confidence and is unable to understand why other might like him, though he fears few do. That’s especially true of his girlfriend/financial backer Yuki (Saki Kato) about whom he makes a short documentary because he thought it would be good to make a film about the person who’s most important to him. But Yuki fires back that the person who’s most important to him is himself, so he should turn the camera around, but that’s exactly what he doesn’t want to do even if the film is really about himself anyway. 

To that extent the film backfires in that, when he’s unexpectedly invited to a festival in Beppu and and convinced by Yuki to go because she’s irritated by just how little effort he seems to put in, all anyone can talk about is Yuki who they say must love him very much or at any rate has a lot of patience and understanding. This is doubly true of the lady running the Bluebird Theatre who says out loud live during the Q&A that his film was boring, and she only chose it because of the contrast between how mediocre the film was and Yuki’s force of personality. She suggests that Taro doesn’t know what sort of films he wants to make, or even why he’s making them in the first place, and she’s right.

Awkwardly, this sense of confusion seems bound up with his relationship with Yuki which is unbalanced in his mind because she asked him out rather than the other way round. As he tells Miki (Hana Amano), an extremely extroverted young woman with an amazing laugh that he meets on his travels, his biggest regret in life is not being able to tell he girl he liked that he liked her in high school. This indecision and lack of confidence have left him directionless in his film career and uncertain in his relationships while it seems clear Yuki is not really his muse despite what others might say about her star quality if only by virtue of how sorry they feel for her for having to put up with Taro.

But then again, he’s basically swept away Miki too who hijacks his last couple of days touring the saunas around the hot springs resort. She explains that she likes to travel alone because she difficulties interacting with other people, though she gets along much better with strangers which is why she clicks so quickly with Taro even if he’s only hanging out with her by virtue of being too polite/spineless to decline her invitations. The pair end up echoing Before Sunrise in their walking tour of the natural attractions of the area, while Miki tells him that her biggest regret in life is that she hasn’t achieved anything that society values even if there are things that she’s good at and fears that she won’t be able to do the things that she wants to do before she dies. 

Truth be told, Taro doesn’t really do much for Miki or ask any real followup questions while simultaneously beginning to fantasise about her as recounted through an incrediblely meta sequence taking place in his treehouse room. Nevertheless, he begins to see in her the kind of muse he’s been looking for along with discovering why he wants to make films and what kind of films he wants to make. But in then in true Adachi fashion, maybe Taro is just as superficial as he says he is and later drawn to another pretty woman on a train all while not making that much of an effort to get back to Yuki whose father has had a heart attack to which Taro seems mostly indifferent. There are certainly lots of strange women around Taro from the gloomy innkeeper in Beppo to the gaggle of ladies at a shrine convinced he’s an old high school friend, but as much as he has a talent for encountering the surreal, Taro doesn’t seem to know what to do with it and remains a somewhat passive observer to afraid to voice his feelings, simultaneously making films only about himself that nevertheless express nothing of his own soul.

Good Luck screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Sato and Sato (佐藤さんと佐藤さん, Chihiro Amano, 2025)

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Aged 37 and recently divorced herself, lawyer Sachi (Yukino Kishii) listens to a man whose wife has evidently left him complain that what really soured him on her was that there was a dead bug in their living room that remained in the same spot for months on end, which indicated to him that his wife only ever swept the room as if it were round, literally cutting corners in their married life. He also complains that she only ever fed the children ready meals for dinner and they only ever had toast for breakfast. “I mean, would anyone call that a woman?” he rolls his eyes and sighs, expecting instant support from his legal team. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that he could simply have swept up himself or sorted breakfast and dinner, though he now brands his wife an unfit mother and seeks full custody, perhaps only as a means of hurting her or vindicating himself.

It’s this patriarchal take on the division labour that comes under the microscope in Chihiro Amano’s profoundly moving marital drama, Sato and Sato (佐藤さんと佐藤さん, Sato-san to Santo-san). Following the gradual disintegration of a relationship under the pressures of contemporary married life along with changing notions of gender roles, toxic masculinity, and the ways in which men and women navigate the domestic environment, the film seems to ask why it is that there isn’t more equality across the board, with practical and emotional responsibilities for the home still disproportionately falling on one partner.

This is all is more obvious when Tamotsu (Hio Miyazawa) ends up becoming an accidental househusband after repeated failures to pass the bar exam. He and Sachi, who share a surname which is also the most common in Japan making them a pair of everypersons, met as members of the university coffee club and, in truth, seemed somewhat mismatched from the start. She just bought the deal of the day and had the beans ground there. He’s carefully researched the best on offer and had the beans roasted to perfection with the intention of grading them on the day for the best flavour. Depending on how you see it, perhaps they complement each other and round out the corners to become one whole, but, on the other hand, maybe they aspire to different things. Nevertheless, they become a happy young couple full of hope and expectation for the future. But their relationship is soured by Tamotsu’s failures, and only more so when Sachi says she’ll study for the bar with him only to end up passing herself when he again yet fails.

Of course, it’s embarrassing for Tamotsu on a personal level that he can’t pass the exam, especially when he’s so told so many people that he’s going to be a lawyer. He’s been putting everything else on hold, including his relationship with Sachi having put off meeting her parents until he’s passed out of fear he’ll disappoint them. The sense of inadequacy begins to eat away at him, especially after Sachi begins working as a lawyer and is taking care of most of their bills. The other men we meet in the film, especially Sugai who is being divorced by his wife of 50 years, stress their position as a provider, as if that were all they needed to do in order to fulfil their role and buy their wife’s devotion. But Mrs Sugai, who now refuses to see him, states only in a letter that living with him is unbearable and he all he ever did was shout at her so there’s no prospect of communication. Tamotsu too is further driven into despair by the thought that others see him as “unmanly” because he’s being supported by his partner, though in reality masculinity is a performance for other men and not really something most women care about. What begins to bother Sachi is not his failure, but that she feels as if he’s given up and is not really contributing to their relationship or seriously studying to pass the exam. 

On a visit back to his hometown due his grandmother’s health crisis, starts to bond with a local woman and almost forgotten childhood friend who has herself escaped an abusive marriage but lost her children to her in-laws. He sees in her a more idealised kind of traditional wife, but after conplimenting him that his wife must be very lucky as he helps clear up at the bar where she works while all his friends doze off drunkenly, she gives him a rude awakening. He’s just like the others after all. He wants comfort, which is to say emotional labour from her, a woman he doesn’t really know, and the absolution sought by every man who says his wife doesn’t understand him. He wants to be told that he’s right and good, even while he blames Sachi and his domestic responsibilities for his inability to pass the bar. While talking with his old friends and hearing that his ageing father is planning to close their family farm, he starts to think about moving back and starting some sort of non-profit but as Sachi says when he puts it to her rather abruptly, he’s not really serious. Even if this sort of life might really suit him better, it’s not a decision he’s made after coming to the realisation that the bar exam is beyond him, but an attempt to run away not only from his failure but his domestic responsibilities. 

But by the same token, even while the roles are reversed Sachi falls into many of the same traps as an insensitive husband. So busy with her own working life, she doesn’t really see things from Tamotsu’s perspective and is only irritated by what she sees as his failure to commit to one thing or another. He is annoyed when she does things like point out there’s no toilet paper or contemplates buying a washing machine to make his life easier, because really he doesn’t think these things should be his responsibility and suggesting they are makes him feel like less of a man. They can’t orient themselves around the idea of a marriage as a domestic partnership in which they split both domestic and external labour equally and are each responsible for the whole. 

But then again, perhaps society isn’t ready for that either. Though Tamotsu does actually take care of the home environment and is the main caregiver for their son, Fuku, others still look to Sachi where a child is concerned. When they’re called into school because Fuku has apparently seriously injured another child in a squabble over building blocks, Tamotsu wants to ask more questions about how this happened, but Sachi immediately takes over and reassures the teachers she’ll make the necessary apologies to the other family, whispering in private that they’re all too busy to string this out which may not, of course, be very helpful in terms of Fuku’s further development. Conversely, when the pair are picked up by police after a violent argument in the street, the officer insists he has to write down “unemployed” even if Tamotsu says he’s a househusband, while when Sachi replies “lawyer” he assumes she’s trying to assert her right to legal representation and chuckles that she’s not under arrest so it isn’t necessary. She has to show him her lawyer’s pin to explain, and even then he just stares at them dumbfounded by their usual family setup. 

Sachi’s friend Shino who consults her for divorce advice when her husband cheats on her, reflects that Sachi might have had it easy in one sense because she never needed to change her name and accommodate herself with the loss of identity that comes with being called “Mrs Hasegawa” or “Miki’s mum” rather than by her birth name which admittedly was passed down from a father rather than a husband. For Shino taking back her maiden name was more important than a divorce in allowing her to reclaim herself as an individual who has choices and agency and isn’t someone who exists only in relation to a man in her social role as wife and mother. The film suggests the reason the marriage is unsustainable is precisely because society doesn’t accept it as a partnership of equals, so even when Tamotsu finally passes the bar, they end up with what’s perceived as two husbands and no one taking care of the domestic space to which the only solution is two households. With profound empathy for each, the film takes care not to apportion any blame, except perhaps on the parade of useless husbands being sued for divorce while unable to understand why their wives have left them or accept any responsibility for the failure of the marriage, but sees only the sadness of romantic failure and the impossibility of an uncompromised happiness in an otherwise oppressive society.

Sato and Sato screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Army on the Tree (木の上の軍隊, Kazuhiro Taira, 2025)

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Based on an unfinished play by Hisashi Inoue, Kazuhiro Taira’s Army on the Tree (木の上の軍隊, Ki no Ue no Guntai) confronts the absurdity of war by marooning its heroes in a banyan tree far above the conflict but also increasing unwilling to come down and face an uncertain reality. Instead, they remain in a kind of limbo, trapped somewhere between life and death in continuing to fight their war in their own way while unbeknownst to them, the wider world moves on.

In any case, this “army of two” is comprised of very different men with a complicated and ever-shifting dynamic. Lieutenant Yamashita (Shinichi Tsutsumi) is a loyal militarist from Miyazaki on the mainland, while private Agena (Yuki Yamada) is a local who has never left the Okinawan island where his family were once farmers, until the Japanese army requisitioned their land. The truth is that Japan is a coloniser here, too, and there’s an awkwardness involved in the way they see the islanders as both Japanese and not. While discussing the building of a new air base Yamashita describes as the envy of the Orient, one of the other officers suggests they will simply use “the locals” in suicide attacks as if their lives are completely disposable and not of equal value to those of the mainland soldiers, while simultaneously suggesting they belong entirely to the empire for the commanding officers to use as they see fit. They’ve been training the civilian villagers in local defence using spears to attack straw models labelled “Churchill” and “Eisenhower”, but when one older man jokes about smearing his with excrement so the enemy might have a better chance of dying of infection, Yamashita beats him about the head for what seems like an eternity.

It’s Yamashita who seems to cling fiercely to militarist ideology and his loyalty to the emperor, even if there’s an obvious conflict in the fact that he’s “run away” to hide in this tree with Agena while the rest of his men are dead. This also gives him an additional psychological reason to want to stay up there so that he won’t have to face his guilt and shame in the defeat and having survived it along with having allowed all of his men but one to die. Trapped there together, the two men have no reason to believe that anything has changed and think the battle is still ongoing with American soldiers patrolling the forest. They attempt to survive foraging for food and water, drinking from a trough into which a dead body has fallen while Yamashita at first firmly rejects the idea of eating tinned food left behind by the Americans, describing it as “enemy food” and the eating of it as an act of treachery. Agena is not so foolish and finally gets Yamashita to eat some and avoid starvation by tipping some of it into an old Japanese army ration tin.

But as much as Yamashita is in charge by virtue of military hierarchy, he’s also a stranger here while Agena is intimately familiar with the terrain. He has a much better idea of knowing how to survive in the forest and which plants and insects are okay to eat. The truth is that the army had confiscated all this land to turn it into an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” which the local recruits had to build with their own hands. Once the situation deteriorates, they’re ordered to blow the whole thing up to prevent the Americans taking it over rendering their labour entirely pointless especially as their only goal is to slow the Americans down. They have no real prospect of stopping them or of surviving the assault. Meanwhile, as Agena points out, neither he nor the island will ever be the same again. His mother had lost her mind after their land was taken and his father failed to return from the war, while most of his friends are dead and the places he played as a child have taken on new meanings or perhaps no longer exist. The world before the war is lost to him, and he can’t ever go home again, unlike Yamashita who still has somewhere, and presumably also someone, to go back to.

Yamashita is not altogether appreciative of this fact as much as he comes to see Agena as a stand in for the son from whom he’d become estranged because of his hardline authoritarianism. Nevertheless, the bond that’s arisen between them does begin to reawaken his humanity and dissolve the rigidity of his ideology so that he is gradually able to accept the reality that Japan has lost the war, their battle is over, and it’s time to come down from the tree. Taira largely avoids judgement or falling into the trap of glorifying these men’s actions as soldiers who refused to give in, focussing instead on the absurdity of their position along with the literal and psychological dimensions of their purgatorial existence as they attempt to process how to move forward into an unknown world while still tormented by the old.

Army on the Tree screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Detective Conan: One-Eyed Flashback (名探偵コナン 隻眼の残像（フラッシュバック）, Katsuya Shigehara, 2025)

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Detective Conan (Minami Takayama) returns for the 28th instalment in the long-running animated film series, Detective Conan: One-Eyed Flashback, (名探偵コナン 隻眼の残像（フラッシュバック）, Meitantei Conan: Sekigan no Flashback) as he finds himself embroiled in another mystery revolving around Inspector Yamato’s (Yuji Takada) near fatal collision with an avalanche, a potential terrorist attack on a radio observatory, and the murder of one of Kogoro Mori’s (Rikiya Koyama) old friends. Meanwhile, justice is under fire as the government are working on reforming the plea deal system which leaves some feeling short-changed by justice and that the criminals are getting off too lightly while victims of crime continue to suffer.

Indeed, there’s a kind of symmetry between Conan’s guardian Kogoro, who took him in after he was shrunk to the size of a child by the evil Black Organisation, and bereaved father Funakubo who blames himself for what happened to his daughter Maki because he sent her back to his gun shop where she got caught up in a robbery. Before she left, she said she had something to tell him, but he never got to hear what it was, just as Kogoro never heard what his former colleague from his police days, Croco, wanted to tell him when he set up a clandestine meeting in a local park but was killed by a mysterious assassin before he could say anything. 

Once again, Conan is on the case, though Kogoro more or less sidelines him and insultingly repeatedly reminds Conan that this is not a game. Nevertheless, Inspector Yamato specifically asks for his help, while Conan begins to suspect something bigger is motion when he’s unsubtly bugged by someone he assumes is probably an undercover Public Security officer. All roads lead back to Amuro (Takeshi Kusao), who handles the situation from the cafe in Tokyo where he works to maintain his cover identity. 

Nevertheless, it all links back to the gun shop robbery and its lingering effects on the victims. Not only was one of the thieves not caught, but the other got off on a plea bargain which has left Mr Funakubo on a constant quest for justice in which he is forever hassling the Nagano Police for updates on his case. Meanwhile, there’s interpersonal drama in play in the relationship between police officers Yamato and Yui (Ami Koshimizu) who are also wrestling with unspoken feelings and the fallout from Yamato’s presumed death in the avalanche in which he lost his memory and wasn’t found until a few months later. The wound to his eye is symbolic of his inability to recall the whole of what happened before he was overcome by the snow. He must have seen the face of the man he was chasing at the time, but he can’t remember it. 

Though the mystery itself may not be as complicated as others in the series, involving few clues or difficult puzzles to be solved and relying instead on Conan’s keen intuition and people skills, it leans heavily into a sense of conspiracy and paints Public Security in an unflattering light as they attempt to bug Conan and then in a post-credits scene, are seen to offer another “plea deal” to a suspect in return for keeping Public Security out of their testimony while blackmailing them that, should they choose to speak out, all their secrets will also be revealed to the public and those close to them will suffer. In any case, Conan gets a few more opportunities to use his all-powerful skateboard amid the film’s increasingly elaborate action sequences as he squares off against the crazed villain hellbent on vengeance and an ironic defence of the law.

Where Public Security come in for scrutiny, the police are depicted as universally good, reminding the suspect that it’s the police’s job the enforce the law without fear or favour while protecting ordinary people both physically and emotionally. As messages go, it might be a little authoritarian, but it’s also true that the police take Conan seriously in ways others may not. While they’re all busy with the crime(s), Conan’s friends are also all in Nagano along with Ran (Wakana Yamazaki) enjoying what’s supposed to be a stargazing holiday before being dragged into the case and providing important backup for Conan. As the tagline says, the truth won’t stay buried forever and Conan does his best to play off Public Security and the police in order to solve the case, avenge Kogoro’s friend, and also protect justice in Japan as the courts debate the plea bargain issue and its effect on criminals and victims alike as they try to rebuild their lives in the wake of crime.

Detective Conan: One-Eyed Flashback is in UK cinemas from 26th September courtesy of CineAsia.

Trailer (Japanese / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Dear Stranger (ディア・ストレンジャー, Tetsuya Mariko, 2025)

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The Japanese film industry is generally regarded as fairly insular and focused solely on the domestic market with half an eye on other Asian territories where its stars are already popular. It has, however, made some attempts to enter Hollywood particularly in the 1970s with films such as Kinji Fukasaku’s Virus which for various reasons was largely unsuccessful in either market and suffered artistically from its attempts to bend itself to an international audience. 

Tetsuya Mariko’s Dear Stranger (ディア・ストレンジャー) is the first in Toei’s contemporary attempt to court an audience outside of Japan as part of its Toei New Wave 2033 initiative, but it seems to be suffering from some of the same problems. The biggest is that 90% of the film is in English but the delivery is often stilted and inauthentic from both the international and native-speaking cast. That may in one way be ironic, as one of the major themes is the impossibility of communication. Emotional clarity is only really revealed during the puppetry sequences when no dialogue is involved. Set in New York, the film shifts between Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, English and sign language, but simultaneously suggests the problem is less an external language barrier than an internal one that prevents people from saying what they really mean or encourages them to keep the truth of themselves hidden.

It’s living in this liminal third space that disrupts the marriage between Taiwanese-American Jane / Yi-zhen (Gwei Lun-mei) and her Japanese husband Kenji (Hidetoshi Nishijima) as she points out that they speak to each other in a language is not their own. At moments of high tension, they argue in Mandarin and Japanese, though as we largely discover there are more issues in play, beginning with the fact that their marriage may at least partially have begun as one of convenience. Kenji is not the biological father of their young son Kai. Jane finds herself asking who they are as a couple without him and if she ever really loved Kenji at all. Kenji suggests he married her because he loved her and accepted the child as his own for the same reason, but throughout the film is in an incredibly angry and hostile mood. He appears at times sexist, criticising Jane for not keeping the house tidy while he is “under a lot of pressure” at work and resents “the chaos” of their life. Jane’s mother doesn’t approve of her working either and calls her a bad mother for doing so even while expecting her to mind their convenience while she tries to find a carer to look after her father who is living with advanced dementia and can’t be left alone.

Part of that is likely that they need someone who speaks Mandarin, hinting at the sense of isolation and orphanhood that comes with migration in lacking extended familial support that in this case does not seem to be met by community. Jane too feels isolated and trapped by her role as a mother. She expresses herself only through her puppetry, which is also something denied her by Kenji and her mother. Kenji, meanwhile, feels undervalued at the university where his supervisor seems dismissive of him and his work which he regards as unoriginal. He may have decided to marry Jane in part in search of family having lost of his own in Japan with his mother never having been found after the Kobe earthquake when when he was a teenager, but simultaneously struggles to integrate himself within their family. His loss of Kai who disappears while he was supposed to be taking care of him is then symbolic in reflecting his own frustrated paternity and fear that the biological father will return to take all this away from him.

In many ways, it’s Kenji’s own psyche that’s in ruins informing his academic practice which focuses on abandoned and disused buildings and the effect they have on the surrounding environment. He’s asking himself how to create a new world from the ashes of the old, but doesn’t appear to have done so successfully in his own life and is increasingly unsure if he wants to. Perhaps because of its awkwardness, the film takes on an increasingly surreal quality as Kenji is heckled by irrationally angry guests at his book presentation and basically accused of facilitating urban crime in his praise of disused spaces and then descends into some kind of fugue state chasing the larger-than-life puppet version of Kai from Jane’s play which is also an embodiment of her own frustrated yearning for freedom. 

“In the wreckage we find truth,” Kenji answers one of the questioners at his presentation and it may in a sense be true for him but in another perhaps not. It becomes unclear what exactly he experiences as “real” and what not, what a product of his own mythologising and what actually happened, while Jane slips quietly into the background and her sudden acceptance of Kenji whom she previously regarded as “unreliable” and appeared to resent, seems somewhat hollow given that he continues to treat her coldly and is extremely hostile with all around him from the police, who are actually trying to help find his son, to the well-meaning kindergarten teachers, and his employers. In the end, it’s really Kenji who is stranger to himself much more than a stranger in a strange land trying to forge a new identity in a place of psychological ruin.

Dear Stranger was screened as part of this year’s Busan International Film Festival

Trailer (English subtitles)