Alicia Haddick’s review published on Letterboxd:
Took a long time to get to putting this review down as there’s a lot to take in with this film, but there’s one thing you can say about it without any doubt: this is the sort of singular work you’d expect from a creator like Mari Okada.
I’d want to look at the production cycle for this film but so much of the story and direction of this film feels not just defined by Okada’s own openly-complicated views on family and love that she’s tackled throughout her work, but on the shift in our understanding of the social contract in a post-COVID landscape. This is a film set during the time of Okada’s own childhood and definitely reflects those experiences, but it’s set in this world where everything is shut off from the outside world with no ability to leave, and everything must be kept in equilibrium and unchanging in order to ensure the safety and ensure a normal return to society that’s ultimately never to come.
The thought experiment that then blossoms at the film’s core is one about the human desire to change and to grow and experience versus a fear of it. Without anything new in the seasons, the people or the experiences that can have, those in charge fear what change and a desire for something new could inflict upon them. Do you accept or resign to an unchanging reality or grasp and seek it out as the thing that makes living feel alive and human? And how can we truly connect with people around us if we can’t change, when our time spent living with those around us and learning and desiring them change our own fundamental desires?
Hope for a brighter future by desiring it, or fearing the future, blocking your eyes to it to embrace the unchanging that you know can never truly stay the same. It feels similar to the ways in which the discussion on lockdowns became a rejection of their necessity and the lack of a need for a change to those wishing for it. Or, to tie it to Japanese society at the time of the film’s 1990s setting, the paralysis that set into the country after the bubble collapsed and the country entered a lost decade that led to generations of people being left behind by a social contract that no longer worked for them.
Yet it ties all these ideas into a wonderful story of what it means to be human and to love, about kids who love knowing their wish will change and destabilize things, knowing that even though it could all end by their actions that surely living is better than an undead, unfeeling existence. And the trigger for it all is a young wolf-like girl living in the factory where the explosion that froze the world occurred, and the classmate who draws him into his spell.
There are issues here: i feel the film doesn't do enough to fully describe and explore its setting and ideas to the point of confusing some audiences. I also really don't think this film is for everyone. Yet there's something wonderful and unique about this film in all the ways you would expect from a creator like Okada. And for all its incisiveness at the topics it discusses I don’t think many films feel quite as loving either.
I highly recommend catching this when you have the opportunity. It deserves the world… one that embraces its everything and, if only slowly, begins to change.
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