Japan Cuts 2024: 5 Must-See Movies at North America’s Largest Japanese Film Fest

‘August in the Water’ (dir. Gakuryū Ishii)

Japan Cuts’ repertory screenings don’t tend to receive quite the same fanfare as the first-run films that festival audiences have never seen before, but this year’s 35mm screening of ‘August in the Water’ has the feeling of a main event, and might prove to be the hotter ticket of the two Gakuryū Ishii features that have been selected for the 2024 program (the other is a fittingly surreal Kōbō Abe adaptation called ‘The Box Man’).

Far more subdued than his cyberpunk masterpiece ‘Burst City’ but sweltering with the same penchant for radical subversion, ‘August in the Water’ is a summery romantic drama that gradually melts into a slow-burn portrait of societal collapse. Imagine if ‘Adventureland’ had been weighed down by the psychic strain of ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’ or Michael Tolkin’s ‘The Rapture’ and you might have some idea as to how this story — ostensibly about the love triangle between two high school boys and the high-diving prodigy (Rena Komine as Izumi) they both have a crush on — starts to slip off its axis due to a meteor storm caused by a distant black hole. Droughts give way to much stranger plagues, as people’s internal organs begin to petrify amid Izumi’s suspicions that the whole planet might turn into stone, killing everyone on it. 

Is she lost in the fog of a schizophrenic episode, or is she bearing witness to the subatomic rebellion of a world sickened by pre-millennial social malaise? The question isn’t rhetorical, but any of the answers you tease from this mesmerizing cosmic whatsit will be entirely your own, as Ishii’s human drama is sublimated into an hallucinatory mindfuck that takes you deep into the darkest crevices of your own head.

‘Great Absence’ (dir. Kei Chika-ura)

Perhaps the most prestigious New York premiere at this year’s festival (and the film most imminently slated for public release, with Picturehouse set to debut it in theaters on July 19), ‘Great Absence’ wowed critics when it premiered at the San Sebastián Film Festival last fall, and seems poised to catapult sophomore director Kei Chika-ura’s to the upper echelon of Japanese filmmakers alongside the likes of Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose frequent cinematographer shot this knotty and layered drama about a Tokyo actor who learns this his estranged professor father is suffering from severe dementia. 

Begrudgingly reunited with his old man for the first time in 25 years, Takashi (Mirai Moriyama) finds that neither of them remember the man who Yohji (Tatsuya Fuji, almost as unforgettable here as he was in ‘In the Realm of the Senses’) used to be, or can fully understand why he once left Takashi’s mother for another woman — a woman who may or may not have recently committed suicide. The jumble of longing and resentment that forms around father and son is reflected by the non-chronological shape of the film around them, as both men struggle to arrange the broken pieces of their personal and collective stories before the full picture slips away into the darkness for all time. The task seems impossible at the start, and only grows harder with every misshapen clue that Takashi is able to rescue from Fuji’s dimming memory, but the raw and lived-in honesty that Kei is able to rescue from that process is ultimately its own reward, and proof enough that our parents will always be with us so long as we keep searching for them in ourselves.

‘Kubi’ (dir. Takeshi Kitano)

Takeshi Kitano’s “Kubi” premiered at Cannes in 2023, where Siddhant Adlakha’s mixed-positive review succinctly captured why — in spite of its flaws — any fan of jidaigeki needs to see this one on the biggest screen they can:

‘‘Kubi’ has been on Kitano Takeshi’s (AKA Beat Takeshi) mind for so long that Akira Kurosawa was still alive to comment on it. In 1993, the legendary filmmaker predicted: ‘When Kitano directs this film, it will surely rival my own ‘Seven Samurai.’ Kurosawa was wrong about that, but Kitano’s long-in-the-works epic isn’t entirely without merit.

A re-imagining of real events in the late 16th century, when the first ‘great unifier’ of Japan Oda Nobunaga (a villainously cackling Ryo Kase) was betrayed by his retainers (played here by ‘Drive My Car’ star Hidetoshi Nishijima and Kitano himself), the film’s eye-popping, blood-soaked vistas are a marvelous sight, as are a number of its era-specific details and its striking moments of homoerotic samurai imagery. Oda was long believed to have been involved with attendants of the same sex, an idea Kitano attempts to turn into an emotional and thematic centerpiece, even if ‘Kubi’ is ultimately less interested in queering samurai ambition than it is in likening it to a sexual urge.

Kitano is predictably more committed to presenting the absurdity of wanton bloodshed, an idea he sets his sights on early on. As more and more characters are introduced (peasants, performers, gangsters, gunmen, each with their own blood-red on screen text), what binds their stories together is their remorseless desire to scale the feudal hierarchy via the act of beheading. Considering that the film’s title refers to the kubi bokuro or ‘neck bag’ that samurai used to carry severed heads for evidence, you can imagine how well that tends to work out for everyone.’

‘Look Back’ (dir. Kiyotaka Oshiyama)

‘Look Back’ is only 58 minutes long, which might help to explain why — or at least how — ‘Metal Gear Solid’ and ‘Death Stranding’ godhead Hideo Kojima has already managed to see it four times since it was released in Japanese theaters on June 28. Before it was “one of the most remarkable anime of the past decade” (to quote just one of Kojima’s many breathless tweets on the subject), ‘Look Back’ was a one-shot manga written and illustrated by Tatsuki Fujimoto, a form that naturally suited its achingly bittersweet story about two young girls who are drawn together — and then torn apart — by their shared passion for creating one-shot manga. Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s hyper-faithful adaptation recreates almost every beat of its source material, but it isn’t the least bit shy about making the most of its medium. The result is a narratively dense, emotionally overwhelming, and ravishingly cinematic tale that’s both about and defined by how people connect to the world through the alchemy of artistic creation.

Unfolding at a pace that evokes the rhythm of Makoto Shinkai’s even shorter ‘Voices of a Distant Star,’ and telling a story of separation that will devastate you on roughly the same terms, ‘Look Back’ hinges on the friendship between the smug and competitive Fujino — whose comics have made her a celebrity at school — and the even more talented Kyomoto, a shut-in whose beautifully illustrated submissions to the school paper serve as the only evidence of her existence. That rivalry gives way to galvanizing collaboration as the girls begin to grow up and make their mark on the manga industry, but Fujino’s professional ambition is always at odds with Kyomoto’s deferential humility, and the two of them are eventually — shockingly — driven apart to a degree that leaves Fujino with only the faintest hope of drawing them back together. Gorgeous animation, non-linear editing, and Haruka Nakamura’s soaring musical score allow ‘Look Back’ to spiral deeper and deeper towards the heart of the matter, as Oshiyama’s adaptations honors the manga with a creative momentum that only the movies could ever hope to achieve.

‘Six Singing Women’ (dir. Yoshimasa Ishiibashi)

A warped and romantic samurai musical so zany that festival programmers swore it ‘makes Matthew Barney look tame,’ Yoshimasa Ishibashi’s ‘Milocrorze: A Love Story’ was the kind of movie that could help to define the permanent identity of any festival that programmed it; co-presented by the New York Asian Film Festival and Japan Cuts back in 2011, its North American premiere cemented both the former’s reputation for gonzo fearlessness, and the latter’s reputation for celebrating the entire spectrum of Japanese cinema, from vibrant schlock to highbrow masterpieces and all points in between. It’s hard to say exactly where Ishibashi’s ‘Six Singing Women’ falls on that spectrum, but that characteristic unclassifiability is what makes the director’s first feature in more than a decade so worth seeing at a festival where a certain degree of cultural dislocation is built into the experience, and audiences are encouraged to locate things on their own terms. 

In short, ‘Six Singing Women’ is about a Tokyo-based photographer named Shinichiro (Yutaka Takenouchi) who returns to the remote mountain village where he grew up in order to settle his late, estranged, and possibly schizophrenic father’s affairs — and maybe figure out why a shady real estate developer (Takayuki Yamada as Ryu) is so interested in buying the crumbling family house. Things are normal enough until the long trip back to the train station, when Shinichiro and Ryu are driven off the road and taken hostage by a mysterious troupe of green-eyed women who live in the forest and feed on skewered bats. 

One of the women always has a bug in her mouth, one of them traipses round with a blood-soaked ax as if she’s just slipped out of the Thunderdome, and one of them looks oddly similar to Shinichiro’s girlfriend. None of them speak, but all of them chant by the fire and writhe through the woods in a way that suggests Pina Bausch having an erotic conversation with nature itself (the film’s percussive score is worth the price of admission on its own). Transfixing in its sounds and strangeness, ‘Six Singing Women’ gradually coheres into a feverish ecological fable that feels like a hot-blooded response to Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s more frigid — but equally surreal — ‘Evil Does Not Exist.’ Unless you’ve seen ‘Milocrorze,’ then you haven’t seen anything like this.