An often overlooked Japanese filmmaker for reasons which I can't fully comprehend, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest film, To The Ends of the Earth, sees the director employ his dread-inducing formal sensibilities tactically to a relatively simple drama story, invoking the tension and unease of day-to-day anxieties and existential dread. Featuring a great central performance and rich characterization centered around a travel show host whose insular nature and insecurities are continuously amplified by an environment which is deeply foreign to her own, To The Ends of the Earth astutely details the complexities of the human psyche, the cognitive trappings it manifests often being far more debilitating and danger than material concerns. Fear largely drives this woman's reactionary decision-making, fundamentally pushing her further and further from her ideas. The pejorative notions of genre filmmaking are skewered time-and-time again by Kurosawa, a master filmmaker who with To The Ends of the Earth delivers one of the more emotionally poignant films I've seen in recent years; Narrative theatrics are non-existent, very little is told through exposition, the effectiveness of the piece being much more organic in which it is shown not told to the viewer through Kurosawa's acute formalism that is met by Atsuko Maeda great performance
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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