As the world is very much learning in 2026, war remains a valid and pertinent influence behind many people’s decision to move themselves and possibly their families to the relative safety of another country. Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1982 debut novel, ‘A Pale View of Hills’, offered a fictionalised reflection on his own formative cultural uprooting, as he and his family fled the ruins of Nagasaki, Japan, for a new life in the United Kingdom. It’s a story concerned with the psychological traumas that can be inflicted by such a choice, and also the way that it allows us to partition and perhaps even massage our memories of that “other life”.
In this gently-moving and handsome film adaptation from writer/director Kei Ishikawa, Etsuko (Yō Yoshida) is presented as a nervy widow in 1980s England, who receives a visit from her daughter Niki (Camilla Aiko), a budding journalist who’s looking to expand her current research into the anti-nuclear protests at Greenham Common. Her mother is understandably reticent to speak about the past, but Niki sees value in writing something on the Nagasaki bombings from someone who actually experienced them and their horrible legacy.
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The pair’s reticent, stilting chats spark flashbacks to the 1950s, as a more hopeful Etsuko (Suzu Hirose), tells of her tribulations with her uncaring husband, a stern father-in-law and a friend named Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido). Niki is interested in discovering the true reasons for her mother’s departure, for which she left her first husband and remarried, but also the fate of a younger sister, Keiko, who ended her own life after the move. The story is not particularly forthright in articulating its themes and ideas, and while that may work in the slow-burn pages of a novel, it just feels contrived and manipulative up there on the screen.
In all the directorial decisions that Ishikawa makes are at the service of a grand revelation that he assures you will make sense of everything. Unfortunately, gamble doesn’t pay off. It’s a very facile ending, leaning on psychological mambo-jumbo to somehow explain away Etsuko’s perpetual melancholy, and it’s a let down that lays ruin to much of the material that preceded it. Elsewhere, the scenes in Japan do have a stately, dreamlike feel to them, whereas the UK-set segments feel stilted and fairly dismal.
