Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Drifting Home’ on Netflix, A Coming-of-Age Drama With An Interesting Premise

There are many beloved coming-of-age tales in the world of anime, from Your Name to Weathering With You to Fireworks. How does the latest Netflix movie stack up against those beloved properties?

DRIFTING HOME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Kosuke Kumagai (Bryce Papenbrook) and Natsume Touchi (Cassandra Morris) grew up living in the Kamonomiya apartment complex, an older set of buildings jokingly referred to as the now “haunted” apartments in a small Japanese town. They did everything together growing up, but now they’ve gotten older and they’ve drifted apart, moved into separate, new apartment buildings, and rarely speak anymore. There’s an unspoken tension between the two that everyone around them notices, and their friends try to invite them to do things together, which Kosuke declines.

When their shared group of friends ask them to go on a search for the “ghost” in the old apartments, the pair stumble upon Natsume’s strange new friend Noppo (Elliot Fletcher), who says he used to live in the buildings. The kids soon find themselves exploring the buildings, tensions running high as the complex emotions between Kosuke and Natsume come to a head. As a sudden downpour begins, the pair and their friends experience something bizarre: they suddenly wake up to being adrift in the ocean on top of their apartment complex.

Together, the kids must work to figure out a plan for survival, all while Kosuke and Natsume are forced to come to terms with their broken friendship, saying goodbye to the lives they once knew. That means unraveling the mystery of the strange Noppo, airing the grievances between Kosuke and Natsume, and growing up a bit while figuring out how to unpack everyone’s shared trauma living in an area that’s been changed by forces both inside and out.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Though far more bloated and less compelling than its brethren, Drifting Home will immediately recall memories of stronger tales, like Your Name, Weathering With You, or Fireworks.

Performance Worth Watching: Alex Cazares, who many anime viewers may recognize from her recent role as Rebecca in Cyberpunk 2077: Edgerunners, does a great job as Taishi Koiwai, the cocky yet skittish friend that decides to invite Kosuke and Natsume to go “ghost hunting” in the first place. She brought a wild, chaotic energy to Rebecca, and imbues Taishi with that same energy, as if the two characters were part of the same coin.

Memorable Dialogue: “Stay out of my life! We’ve got nothing to do with each other!” An angry Kosuke demands to know why Natsume has his grandfather’s camera, assuming she stole it. This altercation ends up in a scary moment where Natsume loses her footing and almost falls before Kosuke grabs her, but she falls at the last minute in a pivotal turning point for their relationship and the film going forward.

Sex and Skin: Absolutely none to speak of.

Our Take: Drifting Home has an interesting premise that’s buried under about an extra hour of drama and world building. It takes about a half hour to get to a point where you really start to care about these kids’ plight, and it’s purposefully obtuse in the beginning about what’s going on between its two leads. While it attempts to weave a poignant yet delicate tale, it takes far too long to establish an interesting enough story that hooks you long enough to make the hours fly by. Instead, there’s so little action and so much discussion about every single thing that happens that it feels as though the movie’s runtime has lengthened by about half an hour every time you look up.

The way it stands, the apartment buildings and the “drifting at sea” plotline aren’t especially engaging, the conflict between our two leads isn’t as dramatic as we’re lead to believe, and the gorgeous animation isn’t put to good use. We’re stuck looking at dark hallways and apartments, the same shots of the children, and rain with turbulent seas over and over. It’s drab. The atmosphere is bland. The twists are predictable. There just isn’t much to get excited about here.

Our Call: SKIP IT. As far as coming-of-age anime films go, there are far better options that don’t drag on as much as Drifting Home does. It plods on at a snail’s pace with sweeping shots of apartments and dilapidated buildings, then dedicates a half hour to establishing relationships between a group of friends that never quite feel like characters worth backing. By the time the film reveals the problem at hand beyond drama between children, you’ve started watching the clock. If you’re on a quest to see all of the family-friendly anime films on the market this could be worth it, but otherwise you should fly through the Ghibli catalog instead.

Brittany Vincent has been covering video games and tech for over a decade for publications like G4, Popular Science, Playboy, Variety, IGN, GamesRadar, Polygon, Kotaku, Maxim, GameSpot, and more. When she’s not writing or gaming, she’s collecting retro consoles and tech. Follow her on Twitter: @MolotovCupcake.