Koreeda

A frazzled widowed mother, Saori (Sakura Andô), suspects that all is not well with her preteen son, Minato (Soya Kurokawa). The boy seems subdued and withdrawn; she catches him hacking inches from his mop of hair. He asks odd, troubling questions: if the brain of a pig was transplanted into a human, what would the resulting creature be, human or pig? Or some kind of monster? And then there are the injuries – an ear yanked so brutally that it bleeds; a livid facial bruise. Saori soon deduces that her son’s new teacher,…

Film sets are like families, says Hirokazu Kore-eda. They are loose social structures, nominally hierarchical and ideally geared towards a common goal. While the Japanese director accepts that this puts him in the role of the father, he disputes the suggestion that this automatically makes him the boss. He supposes the cast are the children – often literally so. “The time we all spend together,” he says, “is very intense. The cast and crew become very important to me.” But at the end of each shoot, the unit collapses, the…

Hirokazu Kore-eda can claim to be the greatest living Japanese film director, whose family dramas have marked him out as the heir to Ozu (although in an interview with me he said he preferred to be compared with Mikio Naruse). His work, including the Palme-winning Shoplifters (2018) is rightly revered. But he has always had a sweet tooth for whimsy and sentimentality, which I thought was on display in his much admired baby-swap drama Like Father Like Son (2013).Now he has given us a sudsy road-movie heartwarmer set in…