Often praised for their humanist poetics, Kore-eda Hirokazu’s most laureled films have been novelistic family dramas that locate startling profundities within the seemingly ordinary, even banal textures of everyday life, a naturalism that the director strategically glosses with fulgently formalist compositions. From his first narrative feature, Maborosi (1995), through such films as Nobody Knows (2005), Still Walking (2008), I Wish (2011), Like Father, Like Son (2013), Our Little Sister (2015), After the Storm (2016), and Shoplifters (2019), Kore-eda spins out familial and generational tensions from offscreen instances of death, separation, or abandonment, quietly but empathetically following characters struggling with and attempting to parse their changed circumstances.
This thematic consistency has resulted in a compulsion, amongst Anglo-American critics in particular, to bracket off those titles which don’t fit the “official” constellation of (2001), (2006), and (2017)—all of which appear to hew too closely to the province of “genre filmmaking,” even as they artfully subvert the genres to which they nominally belong. Another of these underappreciated and underseen titles is (2009), a two-hour adaptation of a 20-page Gouda Yoshiie manga in which Korean actress Bae Doona stars as Nozomi, an inflatable sex doll who comes to life when she suddenly gains a heart, and whose straddling of the boundary between artifice and reality forms the basis for her existential angst over her position as a “substitute” for a real person. Nozomi’s newfound animacy also kindles in her a fierce, observational curiosity towards humanity: when her “owner,” Hideo (Itao Itsuji), leaves for work every day, Nozomi wanders Tokyo and encounters various lonely citizens, including a receptionist struggling with ageism, a young hoarder, a true-crime-obsessed widow, and an elderly man who used to work as a substitute teacher.
