Tag: 2025

Rewrite (リライト, Daigo Matsui, 2025) [Fantasia 2025]

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A mysterious transfer student arrives from the future. You have 20 wonderful days with him, but then he must return to his own time. He tells you that he came back to meet you and experience your time because of a book you will write, and your future self also shows you the book, tells you you did indeed write it, and that everything’s going to be okay. But in 10 years’ time, when you’re your “future self”, you from the past does not show up to get any of this information. Did something go wrong? Is the timeline crumbling? Or did you just imagine all this as a manifestation of “youth”?

When this happened to her, Miyuki (Elaiza Ikeda) believed that she was “the heroine of that summer,” but the truth is of course that she was always the heroine of her own life and had the right and power to make her own choices. Adapted from the novel by Haruka Honjo, Daigo Matsui’s Rewrite (リライト) is, like Obayashi’s The Little Girl Who Conquered Time, about the dangers of nostalgia and the over romanticisation of youth. What Miyuki gradually comes to realise is that one of the formative experiences of her teenage years may not have been unique or special but happened to literally everyone and changed them too in ways that were not always good. Because she met Yasuhiko (Kei Adachi) from 300 years in the future, she became a writer. But it remains true that her first few books weren’t about him at all. She always had the talent and the inclination. The impetus of destiny was only what gave her the confidence to pursue it. She knew she could, because she already had.

Yet, she’s in her hometown to close a loop on this unresolved romance of her youth despite having built a good life for herself as a successful author with a nice husband she met during the course of her work who is caring and supportive of her career. At the high school reunion she’s cajoled into going to, her former classmates sing the song they were practising for choir, “Cherry” by Spitz, which is also about “rediscovering each other, some day, same place,” echoing Yasuhiko’s cryptic claim that they’d meet again “in the future” (whose he doesn’t say) hinting at the way these feelings have been left hanging with only a yearning for the past and a painful nostalgia in their place. What Miyuki really has to ask herself is if she’s the person she wants to be in the present and is who she is because of the choices she made independently rather than solely because she was trying to fulfil the destiny given to her Yasuhiko.

To do so, she must face the fallacy of the “chosen one” mentality. The film rams this home in the parallel story of one of Miyuki’s classmates who tells her that she wasn’t chosen but actively chose to accept a kind of destiny rather than simply going along with it and that Miyuki too could “rewrite” the past if she wanted. In effect, this is what she’s already done as her husband implies when he repeatedly asks her if the book is “fiction”. Of course, it is, though she believed it not to be because it’s rooted in nostalgia and the personal myth making of the idealised romance of her youth. Matsui too plays with this sense of nostalgia in moving the setting of the story to Onomichi to mimic that of Obayashi’s The Little Girl Who Conquered Time and making frequent visual references to the 1983 film along with casting Toshinori Omi, the original boy who leapt through time, as the class teacher at the 10 years later reunion.

But the truth remains that Miyuki must learn to let go of the past, or else take mastery over it by rewriting her own story to accept that, as her husband says, the past and present are all hers. She can write anything and can finally leave her own time loop by writing her way out of youthful nostalgia and accepting something more like an objective reality along with the life she has now which appears to be happy and successful. Scripted by Makoto Ueda who has a long history of time-travel themed movies from Summer Time Machine Blues to River, Matsui’s poignant drama is shot through with irony and in constant dialogue with pop culture touchstones from the Obayashi film to Shunji Iwai’s Love Letter, while at the same time insisting that while you are the main character in your own life, you’re not the only one and a hundred stories are going on at the same time as yours. What really matters is not hanging on to the memories of an idealised past, but to live the life you want in the present for as long as this particular loop lasts.

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)

How Dare You? (ふつうの子ども, Mipo O, 2025)

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“I told you to shut up about that,” Kokoa’s mother (Kumi Takiuchi) tells her after she gets caught with two other children trying to start an environmental revolution by releasing cows from their paddock. It’s not difficult to see why Kokoa (Ruri) feels so strongly about global warming even if it’s probably her home environment that she most wants to change given adult indifference to climate issues, though Mipo O’s charming family dramedy How Dare You? (ふつうの子ども, Futsu no Kodomo) is less about the issues themselves than the relationships between the children and the adults around them.

The point being that Kokoa hates adults for trashing the world and creating an environment in which she feels it’s impossible to live. Fellow student Yuishi (Tetta Shimada) is drawn to her Greta Thunberg-style speech in class having just embarrassed himself with an essay about his toilet habits and suddenly develops an interest in the environment as a means of getting close to her. Which isn’t to say that he didn’t really care before. In this semi-rural area, he and his friends still go outside every day to catch woodlice to feed his friend Soma’s lizards, and Yuishi is also very keen on animals in general. He’s sympathetic to the cause, but on the other hand, is only really into this because of Kokoa who pretty much ignores him in favour of class bad boy Haruto (Yota Mimoto) who tells her that they need to take “action” to wake the adults up or no one’s going to listen to a bunch of kids whining about methane emissions. 

There is something pleasantly old-fashioned about their tactics which include cutting letters out of magazines to make protest signs they hang up all over town telling people not buy so much stuff, eat meat, or drive cars. But while the other two are increasingly emboldened their actions and their revolutionary activities begin to get out of hand, Yuishi finds himself conflicted. When they spot similar signs springing up made by other kids they don’t know, Kokoa and Haruto are annoyed rather than pleased that more people are joining the cause. Yuishi agrees with a sign saying people should catch the bus because it’s better than driving a car even if buses also pollute while Haruto opposes it. But he also points out that the firework rockets Haruto has bought for another action give off CO2, so perhaps they shouldn’t use them. He tries to deescalate and avoids becoming radicalised, but is eventually bullied into going along with the other two and suggests releasing the local farmer’s cows as their next protest assuming it’s a “nice” thing to do and less aggressive than some of Haruto’s ideas.

But they’re still just children and don’t really understand the consequences of their actions. After all, what’s a wild cow supposed to do? It doesn’t occur to them that the cows could get hurt or end up causing accidents and damage, let alone that they may alienate the local community who are already fed up with their stunts because it’s affecting their livelihoods. Of course, this is also part of the problem. The adults ignore the children because what they’re saying is inconvenient for the way they live their lives under capitalism which isn’t something they think they could change even if they wanted to which they likely don’t. Yuishi’s sympathetic mother is forever reading books about how to raise children well, and so she tries to listen to Yuishi but also “corrects” him in subtle ways like hiding meat in his spring roll after he tells he wants to give up eating it for the environment. Though she may have correctly assumed that he’s not really serious about it and tells him what she’s done after his first bite of the spring roll, there’s no getting around the fact that just as Kokoa said she’s not really listening. Nor does she sort her rubbish and recycling responsibly. When Yuishi looks up global warming on his tablet, his mother remembers being told about this at school too, which just goes to show how long this has been going on and how easily everyone forgot about the ozone layer panic of 1980s and 90s.

Nevertheless, the gradual escalation of the children’s activities towards something akin to ecoterrorism echoing the student protest movement on the 1960s satirises the dangers of radicalisation especially as neither of the boys are really invested in the cause and are only there because they’re each drawn to Kokoa who remains intense and implacable. Their true natures are exposed when they’re caught with only Yuishi stoic and remorseful, admitting it was his idea to release the cows and that he did it because he liked Kokoa and wanted her to like him back, while Haruto spends the entire time crying in his mother’s arms and Kokoa glares at everyone while reciting environmental statistics. Maybe she isn’t overly invested either so much as trying to regain control over her life and using cold hard facts as an escape from her overbearing mother who liked her better when she was “sweet” and ‘cute” and never asked any inconvenient questions. Even so, there is something very charming about the children’s earnestness that’s largely lost on the well-meaning adults around them who may be trying their best in lots of other ways but have already given in to the idea that the world can’t be changed and nothing they do makes a difference so there’s no point doing anything. Yuishi at least has learned some valuable lessons, if only that things go better when you’re straightforward and honest your feelings even if it might be embarrassing in the moment.

How Dare You? screens 20th July as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Dark Nuns (검은 수녀들, Kwon Hyeok-jae, 2025)

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Large organisations have a tendency to gloss over inconvenient truths, but is it really in keeping with the teachings of the Church to ignore a confirmed case of demonic possession and allow a boy to die rather than admit that demons are real and members of the clergy are conducting successful exorcisms? According to Sister Giunia (Song Hye-kyo), a chain-smoking nun with a penchant for vulgar language, it is not, but she is largely hamstrung because of the ingrained misogyny of the patriarchal superstructure of the Catholic religion.

A spin-off from 2015’s film The Priests, Dark Nuns (검은 수녀들, Geomeun Sunyeodeul) goes in hard for the Church’s hypocrisy. As Giuna squares off against a powerful demon when taking over from two priests who’ve botched an exorcism on a teenage boy, it taunts her that the blood of all the demons she has slain will echo in her womb like a drum. There’s a suggestion that the existence of a nun is itself is an affront to God, as if a woman who has rejected her maternity and remained celibate is an aberration suggesting that a woman’s only proper role lies in motherhood. The fact that Giuna is later diagnosed with uterine cancer implies the same, as if she has cursed herself in her decision to serve God and become a bride of Christ. In her final confrontation with the demon, it tells her again that she will die of the tumour in her womb, a fact she already knows, but Giunia counters that she will exorcise the demon from this boy and use her womb to imprison it. Which is to say, she will kill him with her maternity and thereby fulfil her ideal role by becoming a “mother” to this demon, and symbolically to Hee-joon (Moon Woo-jin) the possessed boy, before condemning them both to the flames. 

This fact itself is ironic, as the council at the Church refused her request to conduct an exorcism because she is not ordained and “only” a nun. Of course, a woman cannot be ordained in the Catholic Church and the priesthood is open only to men. Her powerlessness within the organisation makes it easy for them to dismiss what she is saying while writing her off as a crazed devotee of the weird teachings of Father Kim, the priest from the earlier film. When they finally do give permission for an “unofficial exorcism” after Giuna has contacted the Rosicrucians in Rome to borrow some holy artefacts necessary for the ritual, the council inform her that the exorcism will be performed by Father Paolo (Lee Jin-wook). A sceptic who believes demonic possession is a psychological phenomenon not a spiritual one, Father Paolo is an odd choice but there is something quite moving and transgressive when in he fact takes off his priestly robes and places them over Giunia’s shoulders, ordaining her and acknowledging both that what she has said is true and that she is the only person who can carry out this exorcism. 

This is doubly true as Father Paolo had also tried to use the teachings of the Church to press another nun, Sister Michela (Jeon Yeo-been), by leading her to believe that her own spiritual awareness was a psychological illness that she should struggle to overcome through faith and medicine. It seems that Michela and other women like her may have found themselves retreating within Catholicism to reject the destiny of becoming a shaman while she herself was placed in a Catholic orphanage as a “cursed” child born between a human and a demon. Giuna had friend who was once a fellow nun but has now left to assume her true calling as a shamaness. The two remain good friends and often work together while Giuna is open to the presence of other gods and other forms of spiritual divination such as Michele’s talent with the Tarot. As such, all of these practices exist within a wider spiritual universe which is another challenge to the Church’s oppressive rigidity in its denial of folk beliefs and ancient traditions. After all, there is no real gender bias in shamanism, or if there is, it runs the other way for the majority of shamans are women. 

In any case, beating the demon requires everyone to work together for a common goal using, as the Rosicrucian father says, “all available means”. Through participating in the exorcism, Sister Michela begins to accept her own identity later continuing to work with Deacon Choi to track down the remaining 12 Manifestations while accepting Sister Giuna as a mentor figure. They are each in a way freed from the Catholic Church while simultaneously remaining inside of it as they progress with their mission of quieting the demonic forces at large in the world and protecting the innocent from their rippling evil. 

Dark Nuns is released digitally in the US July 15 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Invisible Half (インビジブルハーフ, Masaki Nishiyama, 2025)

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Most people don’t mean to, but in thinking they’re being nice all they do is make someone feel bad. Like they don’t belong, or there’s something wrong with them. Since returning to Japan from the UK after her parents’ divorce, Elena (Lisa Siera) can’t help thinking everyone’s staring at her. They call her the “gaijin” girl, a derogatory term for someone who is not considered to be Japanese, but Elena isn’t a “foreigner”, not that it matters. On her first day at her new school after leaving the last one due to relentless bullying, the teacher asks her what kind of mixed-ethnicity she is and then asks her to tell her all about England, though she’s been living in Japan for over 10 years and can’t really remember it. Nor can she remember much English, or perhaps simply doesn’t want to talk about it, though there’s no reason why she should anyway. 

Maybe not bringing it up would be worse, but the teacher’s ham-fisted attempts at inclusion only leave Elena feeling othered. These are just a few of the microaggressions she experiences in her daily life and even another girl who tries to make friends with her, Akari (Miyu Okuno), makes a few insensitive remarks like how she’d like to have “a gaijin’s face,” and that it’s not fair because she is Japanese. She also goes straight to using Elena’s first name, which could just be friendliness or possibility circumventing the usual rules of Japanese politeness because they don’t really apply to non-Japanese people implying Akari may not think of her as one. Elena says she just wants “a normal Japanese name”, so her new friend starts calling her “Rena” which Elena seems to like because it feels like acceptance, but is it, really?

In many ways, it’s the Elena/Rena dichotomy that’s at the heart of Masaki Nishiyama’s incredibly accomplished debut as she struggles to accept the “invisible” half of herself that is nevertheless what she thinks everyone is always staring at to the extent that they don’t even really see her. There’s another girl in her class, Ito (Runa Hirasawa), who appears to be a figure of fun who everyone, including Elena, avoids and considers “weird”. It’s after the class bullies take Ito’s phone and put it in Elena’s bag to kill two birds with one stone that Elena begins to feel especially haunted. A monster with a bandaged face she can only see when she’s holding her phone begins stalking her, leaving her in a permanent state of agitation.

The phone is otherwise a source of anxiety as it’s many through group chats, text messages, and social media that bullying takes place. Elena firmly believes that the monster is real, though in other ways it reflects her own sense of internal discomfort in being unable to accept what she perceives as two sides of herself as an integrated whole. Her not altogether sympathetic mother can’t begin to imagine what she’s going through, and there’s another part of her that wonders if she should have stayed with her father, though the situation may not have been much different in the UK. Her well-meaning teacher tells her she should learn to trust adults more, and asks why Elena is keeping things from her in a way that makes it sound like a personal slight or in someway a malicious act on Elena’s part. Elena replies it’s because she also Japanese, which is to say not someone Elena currently feels she can trust while also implying that Elena also does not quite consider herself to be “Japanese”.

The lumbering, bandaged monster reflects the way in which she is pursued by her own uncertain identity while craving acceptance from others but at the same time afraid to accept it. She doubts Akari’s sincerity and worries that her overtures of friendship are a prelude to a long-form pattern of bullying, but it’s finally Akari who is prepared to help her face her monster in accepting that it actually exists. Faced with another bandaged face, Elena comes to accept it as a friend along with embracing her whole self including her full name. Filled with a genuine sense of unease, Nishiyama’s eerie debut is both an exploration of societal prejudice and a coming-of-age ghost story in which a young woman learns to make her own place to belong regardless of the gaze of others.

The Invisible Half screened as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Detective Kiên: The Headless Horror (Thám Tử Kiên: Kỳ Án Không Đầu, Victor Vũ, 2025)

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Five years ago, headless corpses started washing up on the shores of the lake. Believing them to have been victims of the Drowning Ghost, the villagers simply accepted it as a part of their life and carried on as best they could. But Miss Moon (Ngọc Diệp) isn’t prepared to that and when her niece, Nga, goes missing with only her slipper left behind at the lake, she will stop at nothing to find her. 

Luckily, she knows a top detective, Kien (Tín Nguyễn), whom she met when he arrested her former husband for corruption, which is how she knows he’s very good at his job. In any case, Detective Kien arrives to bring a semblance of order to this 19th-century rural town ruled over by a governor who very much seems like he too is probably not really on the level. Though he doesn’t seem to put much stock in talk of the Drowning Ghost, Kien quickly finds himself plagued by weird visions of terrifying monsters and is respectful of the local shaman, who proves very helpful, even if continuing to look for more rational answers.

What he uncovers, however, is that the village can be unkind and judgemental. Nga was rendered an outcast because her mother left the family to be with another man not long after she was born. The other children wouldn’t play with her when she was a child and she’s still regarded as something of a pariah, while her father, Lord Vinh, has always resented her as a symbol of his humiliation. Miss Moon was the closest thing she had to a mother, though she had to leave her too when she was married to the corrupt governor only to return years later when Nga was already a grown woman. 

Detective Kien is open to the idea that Nga too may have simply left with a lover, but the truth is a little more complicated. The problem is that under the feudal order, no one is really free and the younger generation is forever oppressed by the older. Marriages are arranged in childhood and rooted in hopes for social advancement. Marrying a man with prospects is one way a woman can gain status and power, and some will go to great lengths to pursue it. Miss Moon, now no longer married, is something of an exception and operating outside of these patriarchal social codes in asserting herself to look for Nga when it seems no one else will. Detective Kien cautions her not to go with him because the villagers may gossip if they see her walking alone with a man, but she doesn’t really care about that and follows him anyway at which point he is forced to accept her rather than waste time arguing. 

The case of a man who complains he had no choice other than to become a thief after being falsely accused of stealing because the social stigma made him unemployable further emphasises the ways those in power misuse it. Even the mysterious headless deaths at the lake may have a connection with an event 30 years previously in which a whole family were beheaded after being falsely accused of treason while standing up to the oppression of feudal lords. The wealthy elites act with a kind of entitlement in which they bully those below them to affirm their own status. So it is with Lady Tuyet who was seen arguing with Nga after refusing to pay for an order at her fabric stall claiming that it was incorrect. The two women are portrayed as a mirrors of each other, but where Lady Tuyet is haughty, jealous and violent, Nga is gentle and honest. When told she can’t have the only thing she wants in life, she fights back but only for the mildest compromise only for Tuyet to react with rage unable to accept that some may prefer Nga over her.

Detective Kien does what he can to right this wrong while trying to find out what’s happened to Nga and, if possible, save her. He gets a tremendous sword fight after tracking down the secondary villain while even Lady Moon has a hilariously unladylike tussle with her own opposite number as she tries to rescue Nga. The chemistry between them as they investigate the mystery together adds a charming and often quite funny touch to what is otherwise a horrifying tale of heartless cruelty and murder in which the “evil” in the village turns out to be something quite different from that first imagined and possibly much more difficult to exorcise.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Old Woman with the Knife (파과, Min Kyu-dong, 2025)

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There’s an acute vulnerability that comes with ageing. It’s not vanity or mortality so much as your body betraying you as even once simple tasks become increasingly more difficult. When you’re an assassin, a loss of speed or dexterity is cause for concern and Hornclaw (Lee Hye-young) is beginning to feel her age. Her hands have begun to shake uncontrollably and as she admits to a stray dog she finds herself taking in, you forget things when you’re old. There are those in the office who have begun to notice that Hornclaw is not quite as she was and view her as a thorn in their side, a relic of an earlier era preventing them from moving on into a hyper-capitalistic future.

The original Korean title of Min Kyu-dong’s The Old Woman with the Knife (파과 Pagwa) is “bruised fruit”. An old woman working at a greengrocers throws in an extra peach for free because it’s damaged and people won’t buy them, which is silly, in her view, because they’re the best ones and always taste the sweetest. On that level, the film is about ageism and the ways older people are often written off as past their prime, but on another also about Hornclaw’s bruised but not quite buried heart and the hidden empathy that defines her life even as a contract killer. It may also in its way refer to her opposite number, Bullfight (Kim Sung-cheol), a hotshot young assassin recruited by her less ethically minded boss Sohn (Kim Kang-woo) who despite his sadistic cruelty is really just a hurt little boy looking for a maternal figure in the legend that surrounds Hornclaw. 

She was a stray dog herself until someone took her in and gave her a home, much as Bullfight is now looking for a place to belong. Hornclaw comes to identify with the dog she rescues, Braveheart, because as the vet says it’s awful to be abandoned when you’re old and sick, but perhaps also when you’re young and lonely. As her mentor taught her, having something to protect also makes you vulnerable while as you age the people you’ve lost return. Like her underling Gadget who sees visions of his late daughter, Hornclaw too is drawn back towards the past in seeing echoes of Ryu (Kim Mu-yeol), the man who saved her, in altruistic vet Dr Kang (Yeon Woo-jin).

There may be something disingenuous in the insistence that each of us must save the world coming from a band of supposedly ethical hitmen who only knock off “bugs” that are actively harmful for society. After all, who is making those decisions as to what constitutes “harmfulness”? Everyone Hornclaw takes out is indeed morally indefensible, but as she cautions Bullfight, when you start seeing people as insects you become an insect yourself. Sohn wants to reform the agency to take on more lucrative contract killing jobs such as taking out a wealthy man whose only crime appears to be being a cheating louse, while Hornclaw insists on sticking to their principles and only carrying out missions of justice which are the cases Sohn keeps turning down like that of a religious leader who has been abusing his followers. 

The vision of Hornclaw as a resentful avenger echoes that of Meiko Kaji in the Female Prisoner Scorpion series. Often caught in silhouette, she too wears a wide-brimmed hat that hides her eyes and aids anonymity, while she at one point gives her real name as “Seol-hwa” which means “snow flower” and hints at Lady Snowblood but also to her own moment of rebirth after being discovered half-dead in the snow and rescued by Ryu who gave her a purpose and sense of self-worth, not to mention a home. The irony is that Hornclaw ends up creating a monster because of her own repressed emotionality and is then unable to understand why this figure from the past has returned to her because her way of seeing the world only allows her to interpret it in terms of vengeance.

But what her new mission tells her is that having something to protect is in many ways the point and the very thing that gives her an edge over those who have nothing left to lose. Wresting back control over the agency, she vows to continue their mission as it’s always been rather than allow Sohn’s amoral capitalism to win out over justice and righteousness. Truth be told, the superhuman quality of Hornclaw’s movements is slightly at odds with the otherwise realistic tone of the rest of the film in which, as the secretary puts it, the weight of all the years is beginning to take its toll. But ironically it’s in closing her escape route that she finds true liberation in putting her ideas into practice in a more direct way while opening herself up to the world around her. There’s still life in the woman with the knife yet, and there are still plenty of bad guys out there along with a stack of files in need of attention, which is all to say retirement is going to have to wait.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Forte (포르테, Kimbo Kim, 2025)

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A worried policeman nervously asks Yeonji (Im Chae-young) if the rumours are true. They say that everyone who works at Studio Forte ends up going mad or dying, but Yeonji has only just started working there herself and it’s too early for her to say whether that really is the case, though it’s true enough that the building has an eerie energy. Even a visiting film director remarks that the atmosphere is unusual, though it doesn’t seem to have put him off returning. The director, Jeonghwa (Lee Jung-eun), is one of the best after all which is why Yeonji took this job in the first place.

On arriving at recording studio Forte, Yeonji remarks that it seems like a great place for inspiration but the building itself is anything but inspiring. A block of concrete and glass, it stands ominously and incongruously in the middle of nature as a defiantly manmade structure intent on disrupting the natural order. It feels oppressive, rigid, and constraining. Not the sort of environment that best serves creative impulses despite the well-appointed interior with its modern design and copious light from the large windows. 

Yeonji walks the surrounding forest in wonder, but at the same time there’s something odd about it in a bewitching sort of way. Her colleagues seem to be haunting her, seemingly standing around and staring while she’s otherwise disappointed by the lack of faith Jeonghwa seems to have in her. At the first team briefin,g she neglects to give Yeonji anything to do and then tells her to help her colleague Haejoon finish his section of the score for an upcoming film. Only Haejoon already seems to be having strangely. He looks ill, and sometimes doesn’t even turn up for their work sessions to the point that Yeonji ends up working with another colleague, Dojin (Cha Se-jin), to get everything finished on time. 

“Everything that happened here is real.” Haejoon later says cryptically after screaming that something is “here” and means him harm. Yeonji begins having visions of the forest and an oily, muddy figure along with images of death and fire. In any case, even without the existential dread of lingering supernatural threat, it’s easy to see why this place might drive someone mad. Yeonji tries asking Dojin what’s happening with credits on the movie and he brushes the question off, replying only that Jeonghwa will sort it out, which sort of implies only she will actually be credited. When the director arrives for a test screening, Jeonghwa treats Yeonji like the tea girl and explains that she’s “new”, but the director asks for her opinion anyway and she gives it, honestly, though it contradicts Jeonghwa’s. The producer (Cho Sueun) claims she could tell that Yeonji wrote the tail end of the music because it was “different”, which gives her the feeling that her work may be good after all and that Jeonghwa is playing it too safe with her conventional approach. 

Though she had been somewhat mousy and earnest on her arrival, dressed in an elegant if constraining outfit, Yeonji gradually becomes bolder and wilder. She lets her hair down and dresses in darker, looser clothing while often talking back to Jeonghwa and contributing her own contradictory opinions. But in the end none of it matters. She realises that Jeonghwa is basically exploiting her, getting her to ghostwrite the score while taking all the credit. The director makes a drunken pass at her, and while confused by her reaction explains that this is her big opportunity. Both Jeonghwa and himself only got to where they are by playing the game, which means submitting oneself to this kind of quid pro quo. 

It stands to reason that Yeonji’s barely suppressed desires would eventually burst through as they eventually do in the bloody climax building towards a crescendo of emotion in which Yeonji appears to become smaller and smaller behind the piano as the music overcomes her as if she were possessed. Only now has she released her creative freedom, playing Jeonghwa’s piano with a furious abandon that threatens to burn the whole edifice to the gound. Drawing on 1970s folk horror in it its aesthetic the film has an intriguingly eerie, surreal sensibility deepened by its own unsetting score as the evil haunting the studio begins to make its presence felt if only in Yeonji’s mounting resentment towards an industry that does indeed view her as little more than an inconvenient ghost in the machine.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Square (광장, Kim Bo-sol, 2025)

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A young man with blond hair and blue eyes stands out in North Korea, though Isak speaks the language fluently, if with a Southern inflection, and tries to make friends with those around him but is generally kept at arms’ length by those who struggle to understand his motivations. As his boss tells him, foreigners are destined to be lonely, but that goes for the local community too. Constant observation has a curiously isolating quality, as if you were always under a spotlight with every word and gesture scrutinised for potential signs of dissidence, though ironically you are never really alone.

Set in the secretive Communist state, Kim Bo-sol’s melancholy animation The Square (광장, Gwangjang) is in many ways about the dehumanising effects of a surveillance state and the pressures of living in a society in which it becomes impossible to communicate with other people because every interaction has the potential to destroy your life. Everyone you meet is a potential enemy and betrayal lurks around every corner. To begin with, the perspective is Isak’s. He looks at North in the same way we do. Scenes familiar from North Korean travelogues such as the underground station and passages with social realist artwork featuring soldiers smashing capitalism dominate, but he also as an abstracted perspective in trying to reconcile this place with that of his Korean grandmother who followed his grandfather to Sweden before the Korean War. A Swede should eat Swedish food, she ironically tells him in a letter included with a care package full of tinned sausages, through he washes them down a few glasses of soju.

He tries to share them with Myeong-jung, ostensibly his interpreter though Isak is in the North to work as a translator himself and doesn’t really need one despite Myeong’s advanced skills in both English and Scandinavian languages. Myeong-jung always rudely rebuffs his attempts at friendship and appears displeased when Isak tells him he’s trying to get his stay extended. This is partly because of the tense situation, it would be difficult for Myeong-jung to be on friendly terms with a foreign diplomat without arousing suspicion, but also because Myeong-jung seems to have developed some genuine affection for Isak which makes his real job, monitoring him for signs of “harmful” behaviour, much more difficult. Myeong-jung lives in the apartment across the courtyard and has a camera trained on Isak’s window. Like the hero of the Conversation or the Lives of Others he’s become invested in Isak and has begun doctoring his reports to protect him after becoming aware that he has become romantically involved with a young woman who directs traffic for a living, Bok-joo. 

Asked why he tried to help him, Myeong-jung replies that perhaps he was just “lonely” though there is something of a homoerotic tension in his relationship with Isak. After Isak drinks too much on realising that the woman he loves has been disappeared, Myeong-jung steps out of the shadows to rescue him and Isak rests his head on Myeong-jung’s back as they ride home, just as Bok-joo had while riding behind Isak on his bicycle. If that really were the case, his love is as futile as Bok-joo’s or perhaps more so. In any case, he’s right when he calls Isak naive. If their affair were exposed, Bok-joo could be in a lot of danger. His pursuit of her is selfish, and perhaps if he really loved her, the most sensible thing would be to avoid seeing her again. Isak seems put out when Bok-joo tells him she won’t leave with him because she doesn’t want to leave her country or her family for the complete unknown, but were she to do so it would also be selfish. Her family would be made to pay in her absence.

Then again, the worst thing that happens to anyone in this film is being exiled from Pyongyang and other than their loneliness, they do not seem to be particularly unhappy in the North and have no real desire to leave though arguably that’s because they are already resigned its futility. Isak asks Myeong-jung why he doesn’t apply to travel with his advanced language skills but Myeong-jung brushes the question off and replies he’s barely been out of the city let alone another country though his interest in Isak maybe a reflection of his desire for the world outside of the North. Isak, by contrast, asks himself if he could stay in the North forever to live with Bok-joo and make the reverse decision his grandmother once made though in the end the decision is not really his to make. He has to accept that love is an impossibility under such a repressive regime let alone love between a citizen and a foreigner and that the division will forever keep them apart. Whatever choice his grandmother had, Isak does not have any. But despite the melancholy setting of Pyongyang in the snow, there is a kind of warmth to be found that these connections were made at all even as Myeong-jung spins his wheels, riding in circles like Isak and listening to the DiscMan Isak left behind like an echo of a far off freedom.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Escape (逃走, Masao Adachi, 2025)

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Satoshi Kirishima’s incongruously smiling face was a familiar presence across on the nation for over 40 years until he finally made a deathbed confession revealing his true identity as a man wanted in connection with a series of bombings in the 1970s and that he’d successfully evaded the authorities until the very end of his life. What apparently appealed to director Masao Adachi, a former Japanese Red Army member, was the question of why he chose to come clean rather than enjoy his secret victory by taking the truth to his grave.

That might be a minor irony at the centre of the Escape (逃走, Toso) in that Satoshi (Kanji Furutachi) is essentially in flight from himself only to finally escape from his torment by accepting his original identity. As a young man, Satoshi had been a member of a left-wing cell that wanted to awaken the population at large to the ways Japanese society had not changed in continuing to discriminate against the Ainu, those from the Ryukyu Islands, Koreans and other minorities while modern corporations enact another kind of capitalistic imperialism built on exploitation. It was for this reason that they embarked on a bombing campaign targeting large companies, but due to a miscalculation with the explosives, the bombing of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Building in 1974 proved more destructive than intended resulting in loss of life. 

Satoshi was not directly involved in that bombing which was carried out by another cell but was wanted for allegedly setting up a bomb in the Economic Research Institute of Korea which did not result in any casualties. Details of the real Satoshi’s life during his 40 years on the run are thin on the ground, but Adachi paints him as a man torn apart by internalised conflict and unable to make peace with the sense of guilt he feels for those who killed even if he was not directly responsible. The film’s Japanese title is a kind pun in that it’s a homonym which can mean both “escape” and “struggle” which for Satoshi become one and the same. He’s in flight from his younger self while simultaneously preoccupied with how he can continue the revolution in the name of his friends who were not so lucky. Adachi structures the later part of the film as a kind of self-criticism session as Satoshi engages in various dialogues with himself notably as a Buddhist priest interrogating him about his worldly attachments. 

These worldly attachments also obviously separate him from his true calling to revolution including a non-relationship with a woman he meets at a concert venue and is later told has two previous convictions for marriage fraud. Most of the people around him are also leading double lives or harbouring secrets of their own including a man that Satoshi once worked with whom he finds out years later was also another former member of the far left movement living life on the run. The implication is that this sense of isolation and aloneness in wilfully having to suppress his identity became a kind of prison, but that it also liberates Satoshi to a more intensive examination of the self. 

To that extent, his escape is also from contemporary Japan and an act of resistance towards an increasingly capitalistic and indifferent society. Hoping to stay below the radar, Satoshi works a series of casual construction jobs chiefly because of their anonymity. There was plenty to be built in this era and jobs like these were plentiful, usually offering basic accommodation in a company dorm. He experiences the hardships of the working man first-hand and lives a life of asceticism in which live music and drinking are his only outlets. “We’re all dying to survive,” he reflects, “trying to go home,” though he no longer has a home to go to and has become estranged from his previous identity. He meditates on fallen comrades who either took their own lives or spent them in prison while convincing himself that he’s continuing the struggle on their behalf even in the act of running away in perfecting his “escape”. Though Adachi’s approach is less sentimental than Banmei Takahashi’s in I am Kirishima, he is not immune to sentiment as in his depiction of Satoshi’s final escape from life as the ultimate form of liberation even as his ghost proclaims he will continue to fight, but nevertheless introduces a meta commentary of self-examination in Satoshi’s constant questioning if his long years of struggle have really been worth it.

Escape screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

PRINCIPAL EXAMINATION (中山教頭の人生テスト, Dai Sako, 2025)

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What is the place of the teacher in the contemporary society? Are they extensions of authority whose only role is to insist on order and produce children who will be obedient and know how to follow rules, or is it to educate and care for them so they can become the best versions of themselves free from the pressures of a conformist society? After taking some time away from active teaching, an absent-minded deputy headmaster finds himself confronted by just these contradictions as he’s suddenly tasked with taking over a class of primary school children while studying for the exams to qualify as a head teacher.

A mild-mannered man, it’s clear that Nakayama (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) is already overloaded and that the headmistress, Ms. Takamori (Eri Ishida), delegates most of her work to him. Though he was a frontline teacher for most of his career, he took an admin job after his wife’s death and seemingly lost his enthusiasm for the profession but quickly finds himself in the middle of a wider dispute about the scope of a teacher’s responsibilities to their students. He’s asked to take over after the current teacher, Kurokawa (Shu Watanabe), takes a leave of absence having come in for criticism from the children and their parents over his overly harsh teaching style. We see him force the children to repeat their morning greeting several times because they were not “in unison,” while he otherwise singles children out in front of the class for various rule infractions or poor performance. He appears to be more or less bullying some of the students, including Reona (Michiru Kushida), who comes from a single-parent family and is not able to get her mother to check her homework over for her because she just doesn’t have time.

There is a degree of push and pull between the teachers and parents over the shared responsibility for educating the child with some feeling that asking parents to do this kind of task is unreasonable while also reinforcing traditional gender roles in expecting there to be someone at home who is always available and dedicated only to raising children. This mistaken assumption disadvantages children like Reona while also stigmatising her in front of the rest of the class. Meanwhile, teachers are overly cautious of upsetting parents if they tell a child off in school. One irate father makes a point of coming in to see them when his son was merely questioned about something that happened after class and appears to be something of a bully himself. His son was one of the boys who criticised Kurokawa, and seems to have a lot of pent-up anger that could become a problem in the future but there isn’t much they can do about it at school. 

Kurokawa had only been appointed because Ms. Takamori insisted on temporarily suspending the original teacher, Ms. Shiina (Shiho Takano), because of complaints about something that happened outside of school. She had accepted an invitation to a barbecue with the children’s families where a child fell over and was injured. Ms. Shiina was then criticised for not properly supervising the children though she had only been at the barbecue as a guest and wasn’t responsible for watching them. Nevertheless, she was criticised because her role as a teacher leads people to think that she should be somehow responsible for any children present even when attending in a personal capacity as a private citizen, further emphasising a blurring of the lines when assessing the boundaries around the roles of teacher and parent. 

Ms. Shiina, who also appears to be queer coded, is presented as a more progressive teacher who doesn’t care about playing the game but only about the children’s welfare and wants them to grow up to be morally responsible people who can think for themselves. The irony is that Ms. Takamori may have been similar, later saying that Ms. Shiina reminded her of herself when she was younger, but because of the discrimination and prejudice she faced as a woman she decided her life would be best served by following all the rules so no one could complain. A former champion weightlifter, she had been criticised for a lack of femininity all her life and is also subject to the sexist and misogynistic judgements of the former headmaster, Kishimoto, who has made Nakayama his prodigy, but only if he plays the game which means becoming the kind of teacher who puts appearances first and enforces discipline rather than attempting to find out what’s going on in the children’s lives or fully understand the realities of class dynamics.

Indeed, it turns out to be the kids who are following the rules who are the worst and actively encouraging the semblance of order maintained through hierarchical bullying. Nakayama tries to investigate, but only arrives at half the truth and is torn between his desire to become a head teacher, which means submitting himself to the rigidity of the school system, and the idealism he once had for teaching. He finds himself effectively bullied, pressured into going along with things he doesn’t think are right which is the opposite of what he wanted for the children. As he eventually tells one of them, everything the teachers say is wrong, and what they really wanted to do was right, which is as close to admitting the irony of his position as it’s possible to get. 

The film’s English title has its ironies too as this is also an examination of Nakayama’s principles and how far he’s willing to compromise on them to be validated by the system in becoming a headmaster. He betrays his principles when he takes the test, but gets away with it and is in fact uncomfortably praised for his hardline stance after lying to protect Ms. Takamori by saying it was his decision to suspend a pupil who was caught shoplifting and drinking though some criticise it for its unfairness on the child. After all, suspending them will just result in them having nothing to do and getting into more trouble. But on the other hand, some parents now see this child as problematic and don’t want them back at the school where they worry they may prove disruptive to their own children’s education and development. 

The film offers no solutions though lands on the side of the children rather than the authority, sympathising with Ms. Shiina and encouraging Nakayama to regain his former idealism rather than become just another tool of an already oppressive social system. The fact that Nakayama loses his notebook implies a disregard for the kind of rules that are written in the headmaster’s manual and a return to his own judgement while leaving his final decision ambiguous as to which side of the line he will finally be on or whether he can really change this system from within. Though pretty bleak about the education system and its implications for the wider society, there is still a note of optimism in those like Ms. Shiina who don’t care about the rules so much as the children’s wellbeing that there is still a place for a more idealised form of teaching even within a fairly oppressive society.

PRINCIPAL EXAMINATION screens 31st May as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (no subtitles)