Film review

  • Look Back

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rukku Bakku

    Hirokazu Kore-eda  (2026)

    Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film, showing at the London Film Festival a few weeks after its world premiere in Venice, is visually fluent and, except for a protracted finale, well-constructed.  As often before, this director’s purposeful assurance and calm make for pleasurable viewing (and came as a big relief just a couple of hours after watching the abominable Wicker at the Festival).  Yet the story that Kore-eda tells in Look Back feels insubstantial.

    The action takes place in Japan’s Tōhoku region, in and around the city of Yamagata.  The two main characters begin the film as children but are young women for most of the narrative.  At the start, Fujino (Furi Nanase) is in her final year of elementary school.  She’s popular and admired, especially for her manga illustrations, which regularly appear in the school newspaper.  When her class teacher (Kankurō Kudō) decides to include manga by another girl alongside her work, Fujino feels anxious and threatened.  The new artist’s style is very different from her own, but Fujino can see that it shows talent; some of her classmates say as much, or even that they prefer the new artist.  This unforeseen rival’s name is Kyomoto.  She’s not currently attending school because of ill health, but at the end of the year still qualifies, like Fujino and her friends, for an elementary school-leaving certificate, which Fujino’s teacher asks her to deliver to Kyomoto’s home.  Fujino reluctantly agrees, thus meets Kyomoto (Rokka Okada) for the first time and starts to warm to her when Kyomoto makes immediately clear that she treasures Fujino’s drawings.  Their shared love of manga and creative talents are the foundation of a bond between the girls that continues to strengthen throughout their teenage years (Fujino now played by Natsuki Deguchi and Kyomoto by Aju Makita).

    Kore-eda’s Still Walking (2008) changed my mind about watching Japanese cinema – or, at least, some Japanese cinema.  I’ve since seen three of the five films he made before Still Walking and most of the dozen made subsequently; it’s thanks to him that I started to appreciate Yasujirō Ozu.  I must confess, though, to a cultural blind spot about Kore-eda’s latest choice of material.  Although he first came across it in book form, Look Back started life as a 2021 ‘one-shot web manga’, written and illustrated by Tatsuki Fujimoto.  An anime film adaptation, directed and with a screenplay by Kiyotake Oshiyama, was released in 2024.  Kore-eda’s live-action film went into production the following year.  My knowledge and understanding of manga are negligible:  it’s probably quite unfair to assume that its stories and characters are simplistic.  But Kore-eda’s version of Look Back, at the same time as celebrating manga, translates Fujimoto’s original and Oshiyama’s anime into a form of screen storytelling that situates characters in a basically credible reality and, by doing so, sets up further expectations of a real world.  I don’t think Kore-eda meets those expectations.

    Fujino and Kyomoto are respectively outgoing and withdrawn.  The ill health that keeps Kyomoto away from elementary school is severe social anxiety – and she is completely isolated:  even at eleven or twelve, she appears to live alone, though she surely can’t.  At the same age, Fujino is seen at home with her parents (Kayo Noro and Ryō Ikeda) and elder sister (Miyu Sasaki), but they’re soon jettisoned to clear the decks:  Look Back focuses exclusively on the protagonists’ manga collaborations and friendship – which, presumably, help remedy Kyomoto’s agoraphobia.  Presumably, because she and the teenage Fujino are never shown in high school or with other friends, either female or male.  Instead, Kore-eda fast-forwards to the fruition of their manga partnership and the rift between them that then occurs.  The pair receive an offer from Maeda (Masaki Suda), an editor on Shōnen Jump (an actual weekly manga anthology), to serialise the manga they’ve co-created.  While Fujino is thrilled, Kyomoto is now unexpectedly determined to enrol in art college and develop independently from her friend.  Possessive Fujino is hurt, and worried – she sees her artistic identity as inextricably linked with Kyomoto’s – but she starts work for Maeda, who guides Fujino’s successful transition into the world of commercial manga.  Kyomoto gets a place on an art course at a local college.

    Cinematographer Senzo Ueno’s lighting of the rural landscapes of the friends’ adolescent years in Tōhoku is beautiful.  Kore-eda and production designer Shinsuke Kojima gracefully interweave these images with Tatsuko Fujimoto’s original manga illustrations.  I realise that Fujino and Kyomoto are meant to be so thoroughly dedicated to manga that it’s their whole life – to the exclusion of other things you might expect teenagers to do and be preoccupied with.  But both girls, though nicely played throughout, always seem less than three-dimensional.  In the first part of Look Back, I might have mistaken this for something else if I hadn’t seen other Kore-eda treatments of children.  The portrait of the young Fujino has the feel of a sympathetic yet condescending adult perspective on childhood – a suggestion that what seem matters of life and death to a child will come to be understood as less important in the light of experience.  Since I can’t believe, from my experience of Kore-eda, that he would patronise a child character in this way, I can only assume that Fujino’s shallowness reflects her manga origins – and Kore-eda’s commitment to staying faithful to those origins.

    The story doesn’t develop greater depth even when it turns tragic – although the telling of it suddenly becomes far more tricksy.  Working late one evening, Fujino happens to see a TV news report of a horrifying incident on the campus of a local art college:  an intruder, armed with a pickaxe, has attacked and killed students there.  Kyomoto is one of the fatalities.  Fujino’s grief and guilty feelings combine to make her think she’s responsible for what has happened.  On that errand with the school-leaving certificate, Fujino prompted reclusive Kyomoto to leave her room and venture into what became friendship.  Fujino sees herself as having started the domino effect that led years later to Kyomoto’s death:  she now constructs in her mind a what-if sequence of events whereby Kyomoto survives.

    In this alternative reality, Fujino and Kyomoto don’t meet face-to-face until the day of the attack on the art college, which Fujino thwarts.  She’s not a professional manga artist but a karate expert, who happens to be in the right place at the right time and uses her karate skills to fight off the assailant and his pickaxe.  Fujino sustains minor injuries and is just about to be loaded into an ambulance when Kyomoto, a student at the art college, appears on the scene.  This becomes the start of their friendship, though not the start of the manga connection between them:  it’s still the case that Kyomoto admired Fujino’s manga drawings in the elementary school newspaper and felt a kinship with her.  To express her gratitude to Fujino – for stimulating her own fascination with manga and for her heroism on the college campus – Kyomoto draws a manga strip, entitled ‘Look Back’, which depicts how Fujino has, in two ways, saved her life.

    This launches a climactic, lyrical anime sequence (designed by Yuko Kuno), in which Fujino and Kyomoto take wing with birds and even swim in a magical sky.  The sequence calls to mind the quasi-paradisal conclusion to Kore-eda’s last but one film, Monster (2023), but the effect is very different.  The corresponding sequence in Monster, with the two boys of the story happily reunited, was puzzling and quite different in style from what had gone before; Look Back‘s anime apotheosis fits neatly into Kore-eda’s overall scheme.  It also underlines the lack of complexity or even ambiguity in Fujino and Kyomoto’s relationship compared with that of the Monster boys, which had hints of gay attraction and a definite romantic quality.  Neither of those things registers in Look Back, which is all about manga love (a love that doesn’t come across as the representation of something more).  A film is sometimes criticised as being a good idea on paper.  This one gives a very particular meaning to that criticism.

    14 October 2026

  • Wicker

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alex Huston Fischer, Eleanor Wilson (2026)

    A couple of minutes before Wicker was due to start at the London Film Festival, smoke began rising from the front rows in NFT1.  Audience evacuation via BFI’s Riverfront entrance-exit; fire engines; speculation rife as to cause – and effect, on the last few days of this year’s festival.  It was only a minor crisis, though – someone’s electronic device overheated – and we were soon back in our seats.  An hour or so into Wicker, the protagonist, played by Olivia Colman, is at home with her new husband, played by Alexander Skarsgård.  He’s made of willow (this is a fantastical romantic comedy).  When his wife is miffed that he won’t sit closer to her hearthside, he explains that he is ‘highly flammable’.  The pre-screening drama in NFT1 guaranteed plenty of hilarity at that line – one of the few deserved laughs in the whole lousy film.

    Some reviews have praised Wicker‘s realisation of a ‘medieval’ village community, but the setting is once-upon-a-time:  this is a fairytale of sorts.  The village’s residents don’t have names as such.  The men are identified by their jobs, and married women as the men’s appendages.  Olivia Colman is the Fisherwoman, a spinster.  Peter Dinklage, whom she commissions to create a husband for her, is the Basketweaver.  Nabhaan Rizwan is the Tailor, Elizabeth Debicki the Tailor’s Wife, etc, though the villagers can’t believe that the smelly Fisherwoman gets a man and her appellation doesn’t change when she marries.  Her phenomenal groom is the Wicker Husband.  It will be clear from the actors so far named that the cast includes some very gifted people and there are others, notably Ella Bruccoleri (the Baker’s Wife), all of them wasting their time.

    It’s been standard practice for some years now for screen versions of traditional fairy stories to spiff up their source material with at least a dash of gender politics.  In this case, it seems the Ursula Wills 2006 short story The Wicker Husband (which I’ve not read) more than did the adaptors’ work for them, but Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson wanted to go further in subverting fairytale expectations.  How do you subvert once-upon-a-time?  In this case, with some tit jokes, more cock jokes, and loads of four-letter words – all received in NFT1 with gales of laughter, as if this were wildly, irresistibly anarchic.  Fischer and Wilson are also at pains, though, to skewer the local patriarchy.  Wedding ceremonies in the village include, instead of rings being exchanged, the placing of a heavy metal collar round the woman’s neck to signal lifelong subjugation to the man she’s marrying – as we see when the Bottlewasher (Gustav Lindh) takes a bride (Marli Siu).  Bits like this don’t interrupt the jocose tone of proceedings and, because it’s also de rigueur to show the local men as useless and foolish, the patriarchy seems very ineffectual.  But Wicker still uses weedy misandry to encourage viewers to feel as proudly right-on as the writer-directors.

    According to Google AI, Ursula Wills’ story doesn’t aim to be funny – ditto the 2020 stage musical adaptation of The Wicker Husband.  (The filmmakers opted for the one-word title presumably in case audiences got the idea that The Wicker Husband was a sequel to The Wicker Man.)  The original – supposedly a critique of social conformity, transactional relationships, and so on (Google AI again) – doesn’t sound much fun but nor is this horny comedy version, and it’s hard to believe Wills’ fable is as slackly written as Fischer and Wilson’s screenplay.  How come, for example, the Fisherwoman is allowed to break with unyielding tradition by simply deciding she won’t bother with the matrimonial collar?  The film’s big finish sees the Basketweaver, to mark his retirement, create a Wicker Woman for whichever villager offers him the biggest retirement present.  The Wicker Woman is made of spiky blackthorn rather than supple willow, so her kiss and touch wound the Butcher (Phil Daniels) who wins her as a prize.  But why do the randy, lazy tradesmen compete so fiercely for the Wicker Woman since they already treat the womenfolk as sex objects and skivvies?  (It’s true the Butcher has locked his own wife in a cellar so needs a replacement but finding one should be easy enough in a place ruled by men.)  Since the idea of a Wicker Woman doesn’t allow for tool gags and the like, she doesn’t even offer much for the film’s crap jokebook.

    I bought a ticket on the strength of the bizarre premise and the high-powered cast – most unusually, I didn’t even know beforehand who had directed or written Wicker.  I soon began to think they must be anglophone but probably not British.  Husband and wife Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson live and work in New York and she, at least, is Australian by birth.  Why the suspicion they weren’t British?  Partly the lavish expletive count (which called to mind the strangely beloved Ted Lasso), and partly the assortment of regional accents in evidence within the small village community.  Olivia Colman is West Country; Peter Dinklage, with a lot of effort and a few wobbles, posh theatrical English; Phil Daniels his usual Cockney self.  Elizabeth Debicki and Ella Bruccoleri are Coronation Street, and so on.  Fischer and Wilson seem to feel these two elements combine to make Wicker super-off-the-wall.

    Resourceful as ever, Olivia Colman somehow manages to seem almost truthful throughout and Alexander Skarsgård gives the Wicker Husband a weirdly winning chivalry.  (His Swedish/mid-Atlantic accent might have been funny too, if it had been allowed to stand out more from the competition.)   But too many performers exude wacky smugness, and it’s painful to watch someone as skilful and versatile as Nabhaan Rizwan being so awkward and unfunny.  The Ursula Wills story runs to only fourteen pages.  At 105 minutes, Wicker doesn’t sound lengthy but feels it – a comedy sketch stretched hopelessly thin.  There’s no denying the Wicker Husband, from hair and facial prosthetic downwards, is a work of art.  (The lead designers were Joe Dunckley, Sarah Rubano, András Dániel Tóth and Attila Godena-Juhász.)   But the envious women of the village react to the Fisherwoman’s marriage just as if she’d landed Alexander Skarsgård undisguised, so the ingenious design doesn’t count for enough.  Wicker squanders all sorts of talent.

    14 October 2026

     

     

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