The Deserted City (1984) - Nobuhiko Ôbayashi

​At its onset The Deserted City is imbued with an ethereal beauty, the idyllic "Venice of Japan" feels deeply pure and warm. The romanticism slowly fades away, the facade reveals itself, and the deep-seated trauma begins to come into focus. Obayashi's The Deserted City is like walking into a ghost story halfway through; An elegy of rural life and a pensive study of memory that delivers an emotional wallop through a tonal framework built more around mystery than melodrama.  A truly haunting experience that slowly and methodically reveals itself, The Deserted City beautifully juxtaposes the spatiality of the rural environment and the interiority of small-town dynamics against the externality of modernity and permanence and unequivocal power of time itself. Sometimes our memories are not deceptive but informative documents towards our past failings, transgressions, triumphs - Obayashi's film itself offers a curious and considered evocation on just that.