This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Jaina K’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
This one was not what I expected in the slightest. I'm not really sure what I expected, but a slow, thoughtful, intimate treatise on aging, mortality, and separating from one's children wasn't really on the list. I don't really have a whole lot to say about the plot itself; despite being almost two hours and twenty minutes long, the film is incredibly straightforward. All the twists and turns come from the characters themselves, not any sort of convoluted plotting. I kinda wish I did have more to say on the plot...but I'll leave it at how heartbreaking it was. All the kids were too busy for their aging parents, and then they'd never have the chance to change that. I've mentioned worldbuilding in several of my reviews before now, and this is another film that does it very, very well. All of the characters feel believable and real. They all have things going on in and around the direct plot of this movie and none of them feel like they exist solely to be a character. My favorite example of this is Shūkichi's alcoholism. Yes it comes up in the movie, yes there's an entire sequence devoted to him getting too drunk out on the town...but his character isn't completely defined by this trait, nor is the sequence we see said to be his only experience with drinking too much. "Shūkichi struggles with drinking" is a fact of the entire world here, not just a fact of this plot.
On a production note, this film was incredibly raw. For all the interior scenes, even when doing a shot-reverse shot conversation, the camera is just sitting there right in the midst of things. Its almost like you-the-viewer is another member of the family, sitting there, but silent. Everything is very intimate. Most travel is completely skipped, so all we're seeing is the important conversations (or lack of conversations) in these people's lives. "Cramped" is the wrong word, but that's sorta how it feels. There's just not enough room on these sets, in this story, for us to be, and yet here we are watching this family drama unfold.