‘Between Us’ Premieres at Tokyo Film Festival — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- 'Between Us' premieres in the Nippon Cinema Now section at the Tokyo Film Festival, marking director Shingo Matsumura’s fourth feature and highlighting a story centered on unresolved grief.
- Ririka Kawashima delivers a standout performance as Makoto, a traumatized teenager grappling with the disappearance of her younger brother Kenji during a camping trip six years earlier.
- Anna Kurasawa, Asami Usuda, and Akiko Kikuchi portray the other key female leads, with the film emphasizing the emotional labor of mothers and daughters in processing loss.
- Shingo Matsumura introduces a heavy-handed radio news report that explicitly reveals Kenji’s disappearance and possible foul play, undermining the film’s otherwise subtle buildup of tension.
- Makoto and Kasumi join their high school’s struggling drama club and decide to stage a play about reconciliation, symbolizing their attempt to heal where their parents have failed.
- The film draws thematic parallels to Lee Jong-un’s 2019 drama 'Birthday,' which also examines collective grief without depicting the traumatic event directly.
Why it matters: The film places emotional recovery in the hands of teenage girls while sidelining ineffective male figures, making a quiet but distinct statement about gendered responses to trauma—offering limited commercial reach but significant space for its female cast to deliver nuanced performances.
Ask SkimNews
