Goodbye 2024
2024 saw me beat medical issues that have been rumbling on for the last few years but limp across the finish line with a fractured knee. Just after I started a new job!
Once again, what kept me going was family, friends, and films. Having them in my life helped keep me focussed and gave me room for reflection and time away from pain and problems – seriously, being a person who is constantly active and having to lie in bed with a busted leg… watching Paganini Horror and The Changeling, The Legend of Crystania, and other titles kept me sane.
I couldn’t live without friends, family, and films so I’d like to thank them.
In terms of films… According to my Letterboxd Watch List/Diary, I caught up with over 400 films in 2024 but in reality it’s nearly 700. This was mostly down to Internet Archive and Important Cinema Club streams and festival work and sick leave spent watching old films.
I worked for Osaka Asian Film Festival (OAFF) – always a privilege – and covered Nippon Connection (NC), Japan Cuts (JC) and the Chicago Japanese Film Collective (CJFC). It was also cool to have filmmakers reach out to me and season four of the Heroic Purgatory podcast has come to an end and a new season will start in 2025.
So, let’s try to be thankful for what we have experienced. For my part, this year I published 35 film reviews. I was fortunate enough to conduct 16 interviews.
At this point, I would like to thank the OAFF and NC staff and the directors involved in the interviews.
Interviewees:
Aylin Tezel (Falling Into Place), Rikako Watanabe (Suton), Heso (On A Boat), Kahori Higashi (Memories of His Scent), Kota Yoshida (Snowdrop), Junko Emoto (It Must Be Love), Sawako Fukuoka (Sumiko 22), Masaru Sano (Perfect Nervous), Ikunosuke Okazaki (Wash Away), Lin Yihan (Sojourn to Shangri-la), Noriko Yuasa (Performing KAORU’s Funeral), Su Yu-chun (Inch Forward), Atsuro Shimoyashiro (LONESOME VACATION), Daisuke Miyazaki (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts), Shun Nakagawa (Sayonara, Girls), Yo Umezaki (The Seppuku Pistols).
What about my favourite films of 2024? These are the ones that have offered me the biggest emotional or intellectual highs. Here’s a nice track to listen to while reading.
1: Evil Does Not Exist (Dir: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023) gave me the most emotionally transcendent moments that drew the biggest immediate response and also kept me thinking afterwards.
The dramatic work begins with spell-binding scene-setting of the Nagano landscape delivered by pristine cinematography from Yoshio Kitagawa (Happy Hour, Boy Sprouted) and accompanied Ishibashi’s warm musical score. I was lost in the images and sounds of the beautiful snowy landscape of a small village, the rhythms of its inhabitants who live off the land. My cinema brain clocked foreshadowing of future drama via portentous image of wildlife that humans had hurt but became concerned with the present-tense tension between the village and a Tokyo talent agency eager to build a glamping site slap bang in a deer trail and water source.
A contentious meeting gets the crux of this drama at the film’s midway point and then there is a building out of characters with the Tokyo side. Hamaguchi ably establishes two different worlds, one of capitalist expansion and the other of ecologically conscious communitarianism. The film brings these two well-defined sets of realities and expectations into conflict, the tensions between the two lending the film a dramatic weight as the tired Tokyoites redouble their efforts and head back into the wilderness but, resurfacing again, was an awe for the landscape and wildlife surrounding the key players. It’s an amoral way of life (hinted at in the title) that is at once vulnerable to people but also exposes how fragile human life is and how empty ideas of commercial gain are in the face of nature and this awareness of nature’s majesty, how sublime it can be, leads to a heart-in-mouth finale and an ending mysterious, tragic, open to interpretation and exhilarating.
2: All the Long Nights (Dir: Sho Miyake, 2024, NC) is a quiet drama about the need for people to find acceptance. It presents two people, one with severe PMS and another with an anxiety disorder and shows them struggling, struggling hard to fit into society. At first they clash but quickly come to each others aid when they recognise their shared struggle. Behind them is an idealised office space where the warmth of human connection keeps everyone hanging on, not least because others have struggles, it is slowly revealed.
That office space is a planetarium that leads to some beautiful metaphors about the presence of people being like stars/light and that, coupled with the warm-hearted depiction of kind-hearted people helping each other and people making the effort to carry on in the face of hardship kept me emotional throughout. The autumnal feeling of the setting and the subdued colours were calming. This isn’t the most sophisticated drama but it is the most pleasing.
3: Shunga: The Lost Japanese Erotica (Dir: Junko Hirata, 2023, NC) appealed to the art-lover in me and all-round humanism as it gave a historical overview of the erotic woodblock prints
It’s a smooth ride over nearly a century of artistic and sociological development across Japan’s history to show how the art of shunga fit into wider culture. The art could be a tool for fostering social connections as parents passed it on to children, a tool for learning as well as entertainment as fantastical or erotic-grotesque subjects were as much in demand as romantic or practical, a talisman against death as soldiers took them to war, a symbol of wealth, health, hope, and happiness, and also a document of how social mores and sexuality changed, as depicted in the prints and who shared the prints and how.
Director Junko Hirata collects a wide variety of experts and enthusiasts who are all interesting to listen to and the diversity of voices, male and female, young and old, artist and collector, guide us to various viewpoints to give a good overview. I came away with a better understanding of shunga, an appreciation of the craftsmanship and beauty and also a desire to share it with my partner – admittedly, sometimes just to see if she’d laugh.
4: Cloud (Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024) was one of three films that Kiyoshi Kurosawa released in 2023 and it’s his best.
Following on from Creepy (2016), a film that closely examined the fraying bonds of family and friendship in modern Japan, Cloud looks at how the internet, via SNS and auction sites, and ruthless capitalism that prioritises profits over people and trust, has created a generation of people that is at once avaricious and also vicious in treatment of one another, a human sense fostered and supercharged by financial desperation and a materialism that has hollowed out finer emotions. This technology is now and it is stripping us of our ability to genuinely see and care for each other.
In a stellar turn from Masaaki Suda, we get an internet reseller who finds himself the target of a hunting game orchestrated by the people he has ripped off. His depiction of a cold and money-driven professional is chilling but, at the end, left in a poignant situation as he comes to realise too late that he, and people like him, are leading society into a world of dehumanisation and despair.
Kurosawa shows his mastery of film form by transitioning the story from character study to home invasion to death game. It may turn into a thriller film that is unpredictable and action packed but Kurosawa also maintains his social critique right up to an apocalyptic ending that is reminiscent of his finest horror films, complete with dramatic sky choked with clouds that look doom-laden.
5: Whale Bones (Dir: Takamasa Oe, 2023, JC) that I watched multiple times because of its rich atmosphere and a useless central protag in a mind-bending situation.
The mystery begins with the lead character becoming isolated and alienated from society due to being thrown over by his fiancée. He gets sucked into online fandom and chasing after a influencer who leaves video recordings of herself all over the city he lives in. When she commits suicide in his apartment, he goes to bury her body in the mountains. When her body disappears, he chases after the recordings she had previously made to find out more about her and track her down over a series of nights.
It’s what I’d label tech horror as I saw it as a parable about being too online as the protag finds people living in augmented reality and the mystery woman’s recordings breaching the border between past and present, his imagination and reality. The people playing AR games struck me as a little pathetic but writer/director Takamasa Oe shows us a glimpse of the beautiful world they see via dreamlike interpretations of urban landscapes where fluorescent lights and odd costuming come into play. Then there is the companionship they gain.
In talking with Takamasa Oe, I found out that he wanted to show the positive side of online life. In any case, the film ends like a punchline with characters ruing their experiences – and the central coffee shop is a gorgeous local to revisit and revisit the film I did multiple times because I liked the story and atmosphere and coming up with different interpretations.
6: Kubi (Dir: Takeshi Kitano, 2023, JC) is the retelling of 
Nobunaga’s failed attempts to unify Japan and his assassination at the hands of Akechi Mitsuhide – I’ll go with the standard naming format. However, it’s a blackly-comic history lesson because the story is told through Kitano’s ruthlessly satirical comedy vision which undermines the mighty men of myth and history. They are usually talked about in awe and respect but he chooses to depict them as cynical, venal, and buffoonish and homoerotic and into S&M.
The violence and venality is through the roof and comical because of it but this is nothing new from Kitano because he often depicts (male) society as fundamentally insane and driving his male characters to do terrible things.
7: The Beast (Dir: Bertrand Bonello, 2023) is a high-concept film set in a dystopian future following an unspecified conflict. Humanity seems to have lost its way and AI dictates interactions of the lonely little people it governs. People can scrub their DNA in order to get better jobs in society. The procedure simply removes trauma accumulated over past lives via a syringe in an inner ear. We follow a person go through this process and understand that there’s more to being human than logic dictates.
Lea Seydoux’s main character undergoes this process and this opens up vignettes from past lives, starting in early 20th Century France, showing a heart-achingly fated love that could finally come together in the present-tense timeline.
Its themes of fate and love over the course of a century, finding a way to beat loneliness through that mystery of romance are what I like and the sincerity of approach swept me up. For chunks of this film my attention drifted – the 2010s-set LA piece depicting an incel – as I wondered how everything would be tied together but it managed to stick the landing by showing love in the face of terror. I must admit that I thought I was watching an overrated film and then the ending hit and I was left stunned and that ending has haunted me ever since.
8: Ripples (Dir: Naoko Ogigami, 2023, NC) is about a put-upon Tokyo housewife abandoned by the menfolk in her life, first her husband who goes on a decade-long “journey of self discovery” and later her son who goes to a university far away, only for them to return unannounced, the former flat broke, the latter with a fiancée.
What starts off like a comedy about getting even as the main character imposes her sometimes extreme sense of domestic order on the returnees and acts in a petty manner but it morphs into a more considered story of how ripples of resentment cause people to drift away or just get flat-out mad with each other. The housewife, at first so righteous becomes a sometimes wretched, sometimes bigoted character but as poignant stories of broken families and lonely lives assail her, she is forced to reckon with how her actions might have pushed others away.
Ogigami’s film features masterful writing that elicited laughs and some gasps of shock from all of the threads so many negative human interactions and everyday indignities into a story of mutual resentment making people do petty things but she is ultimately humane in presenting multi-faceted characters and allows them all a decent send-off. The visual motif of water feels intellectually rewarding and Mariko Tsutsui, one of Japan’s finest actresses, gives a fantastic central performance.
9: Close Your Eyes (Dir: Victor Erice, 2024) features a film director whose career was brought short when his lead actor (and best friend) disappeared from the shoot back in the 90s.
The story continues in the present-day and this same director gets involved in searches for the whereabouts of his friend and, in the process, roots around in his memories of growing up in post-Franco Spain, his family ties, and his motivations in life. This process leads him to make a better film than he ever might have done had his career kept going.
At least, that was what I read into it. At its heart is a story of human bonds that people maintain, even when life seems to be fading away. The histories of various characters and trips around Spain were engrossing and it also captures a sense of wonder and community that cinema engenders. My nostalgia for the 90s and 90s cinema played a part in why I liked this film. I’d say that this one is better than Cinema Paradiso, which has similar themes. This one is more gracefully told and feels so reassuring at its end.
10: The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) was a last-minute watch to try and catch up with the releases of 2024 and it didn’t disappoint.
It’s a body-horror sci-fi film which satirises the entertainment world with its obsession with youth and its abhorrence over ageing. It’s not particularly smart in what the story says but it is smart in how it tells its story.
It goes maximalist in its depiction of bodies ageing, spines being punctured by needles, wrinkled skin and grey hairs forming and malting, Society-like gloopy flesh things occurring and copious amounts of body fluid. The ick factor is high and it’s totally unsubtle in its approach and all the more engaging because of it. It made my list simply because it is a cinematic spectacle.
Every frame is eye-catching in a satirically funny way or just plain horrific to evoke fear and disgust, every sound and piece of music is jarring, and the editing delivers it to powerful effect. It is really discomforting. It’s grotesque in a way reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s 80s work and comical in the vein of 90s horror movies like Tales of the Crypt. Funnily enough, Substance star Demi Moore was in the first season of that show.
In terms of other media, I played two video games, Bravely Default and Fire Emblem: Awakening ファイアーエムブレム 覚醒 (Nintendo 3DS). Both made me want to write about them but I think the latter is the only one I’ll ever replay.
Thanks for taking the time to see my top films of the year. I enjoyed watching these films and hope you can see and enjoy them, too,
I hope we can all watch more great films in 2025!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
よいお年を！