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‘After The Storm’ Review: Hirokazu Kore-eda Only Makes Great Movies, But This Tender Drama Is One of His Best

David ehrlich.

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Hirokazu Kore-eda first established himself as a major filmmaker with a string of audacious dramas that included a harrowing portrait of modern poverty (“Nobody Knows”) and a transcendent vision of the great beyond (“After Life”). In recent years, however — at least since 2009’s “Air Doll,” a contemporary fairy tale in which Bae Doo-na plays an inflatable sex doll who comes to life — the great Japanese humanist has downshifted towards more openly sentimental slice-of-life stories, churning out low-key masterpieces with such regularity and deceptive effortlessness that it can be easy to take them for granted.

So when Kore-eda unloads another gently brilliant film full of characters so real and full of life that it feels as though could fly to Japan and visit them, it may not seem like much cause for celebration. But when one of those films is just the tiniest bit above his batting average, it’s enough to clarify and crystallize what makes them all so special. Hirokazu Kore-eda may only make good movies, but “ After the Storm ” is one of his best.

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The story of a divorced gambling addict named Ryota (the brilliant Hiroshi Abe) who slowly confronts the fact that he’s becoming the same kind of satellite dad as the man who raised him, “After the Storm” could very well have been called “Like Father, Like Son” had Kore-eda not already made a film by that title. It begins in Kiyose, a quiet city on the outer rim of the Tokyo galaxy, where Ryota’s newly widowed mother (Kirin Kiki, who also played Abe’s mom in “Still Walking”) takes note of the incoming typhoon, and remembers how worried she used to be that every stretch of inclement weather might tear off her roof. Her son is nearly 50, and he only comes home to pawn his late father’s belongings, but he still needs someone to look after him.

It’s been 15 years since Ryota won a prestigious (but not that prestigious) writing award for his one and only novel, and hopes for a follow-up seem emptier by the day. Desperate for cash he can blow on the racetrack, and always short on the child support payments he owes to his ex-wife, the charmingly bedraggled burnout has started working for a rinky-dink detective agency. He claims the job is “research” for his next book, but he’s practically a full-time employee by the time we meet him. The gig suits him — a perpetual schemer, he enjoys blackmailing his clients and turning his pre-teen son into an informant, Ryota squeezing the kid for information about his ex-wife (Yoko Maki) and her well-groomed new boyfriend.

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“After the Storm” may sound like it has the makings of a strained domestic melodrama, filled with teary speeches and dangerous acts of parental selfishness, but viewers familiar with Kore-eda’s quotidian flair know to expect a more pleasant, contemplative affair. For all of the Japanese directors who have been reflexively likened to Yasujirō Ozu (the titan of world cinema providing gaijin writers with a reductive point of reference for any number of remotely meditative movies that have emerged from the Land of the Rising Sun), Kore-eda is one of the precious few who earns the comparison. His eased, comfortable style is light years removed from Ozu’s formal rigidity, but their achingly wistful films are bound by a shared compulsion to confront life’s everyday disappointments, and to reckon with the ones that we bring upon ourselves.

“I wonder why it is that men can’t love the present,” Ryota’s mother asks, rescuing a rare moment of raw curiosity from a woman whose other dialogue bristles with dry humor. “Either they keep chasing whatever it is they’ve lost, or they keep dreaming beyond their reach.” Ryota, the most heartbreaking kind of deadbeat dad, simultaneously manages to do both. As the typhoon sets in, he contrives to use the storm as a way of trapping his ex-wife and their son in the same place for a rare night together; he wants to exhume the marriage he once had, while also becoming the kind of family man that he could never be.

“Listen,” Ryota tells his son as the rain begins to fall, “It’s not that easy growing up to be the man you want to be.” And it isn’t.

But Kore-eda doesn’t let him off the hook for that, he doesn’t follow the Hollywood tradition of forcing his characters to mess up in the first act so that he can cheaply redeem them for something in the third. “Grown ups can’t live on love, alone,” Ryota’s ex-wife sighs in a tender moment that lands with the power of a force 10 gale. And while the people in the director’s films often express their truths in the plainest possible language, detailing their desires and outlining their wounds so that the audience can see them sublimated into every scene, Kore-eda knows that life is less about getting what you want than it is wanting what you get. Watching Ryota begin to reconcile the difference between those two notions is a profoundly powerful experience — funny, accessible, and as immense in feeling as it is small in scale. Sensitive enough to focus on a teapot in a tempest, “After the Storm” may not bring much in the way of thunder, but when the clouds clear and the sun comes up, you’ll look up at the roof and smile to see that it’s still there.

“After the Storm” is now in theaters.

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‘After the Storm’ review: a quiet family drama that glows

In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s newest film, “After the Storm,” a family split apart becomes, ever so briefly, fitted together again. Rating: 3.5 stars out of 4.

Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s enchanting movies are woven from the same gentle cloth: quiet, deceptively uncomplicated stories of families. We watch, leaning in to listen, waiting for something earthshaking to happen — and suddenly we realize that these characters have become a part of us. “ Nobody Knows ” was the heartbreaking tale of four young siblings abandoned by their mother; “ Like Father, Like Son ” brought us two couples devastated to learn that their children were switched at birth; “ Our Little Sister ” introduced a stepsibling into a family of grown sisters, letting us watch as she — and we — became part of a clan.

In his newest film, “After the Storm,” a family split apart becomes, ever so briefly, fitted together again. Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) is a former novelist who’s now a private detective for a shady little office that mostly finds lost dogs. He’s divorced from ex-wife Kyoko (Yoko Maki) and doesn’t spend much time with their young son Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa), who’s touchingly anxious around the father he barely knows. “It’s not that easy growing up to be the man you want to be,” Ryota muses; his mother (Kirin Kiki), more blunt, tells him, “You’re taking too long to bloom.”

A summer typhoon finds them all, unexpectedly, holed up in Ryota’s mother’s small Tokyo apartment, waiting out the storm. What ensues is not an improbable miracle, but quiet revelations, fleeting poetry (a lottery ticket, we’re reminded, is “a piece of a dream”) and a father and son laughing in the rain, rewriting their story together.

Movie Review ★★★½

‘After the Storm,’ with Hiroshi Abe, Yoko Maki, Taiyo Yoshizawa, Kirin Kiki, Sosuke Ikematsu, Lily Franky. Written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. 117 minutes. Not rated; for mature audiences. In Japanese, with English subtitles. SIFF Cinema Uptown.

Like all of Kore-eda’s films, “After the Storm” ends with a jolt; not in the filmmaking, but in the way you realize that you were completely lost in the lives of these people and that, as the lights go up, you’ll miss them.

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After the Storm Reviews

Kore-eda vividly explores the complexity of familial relations while touching gently upon the fundamental importance of treasuring small moments of happiness.

Full Review | Sep 14, 2020

One of Kore-eda's most emotionally poignant films and strongest familial dramas to date, After the Storm is an absolute pleasure.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 8, 2020

It's quiet, sweet, and surprisingly hopeful - just the sort of story you'd expect from Japanese maestro, Hirokazu Kore-eda.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 5, 2020

Koreeda, with meticulous formal control of the frame, makes an enriching observation about family ties and parental obligations. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 24, 2020

Taking on many Japanese social issues - divorce, unemployment, elderly care, albeit very subtly, After the Storm is another gentle family tale with great measured performances from everyone involved.

Full Review | Jul 17, 2020

The performances of After the Storm are indeed exceptional across the board, including pitch-perfect leading man Abe, as well as Maki, who distinguishes her bitter divorcée role with a crusty, steely impatience.

Full Review | May 2, 2019

This is the latest work of acclaimed director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose filmic signature is the subtle and small-scale character study in the tradition of the late Japanese film auteur Yasujiro Ozu.

Full Review | May 1, 2019

Japanese auteur Hirokazu Koreeda strikes gold yet again with this superlative and poetic portrait of another fractured family unit.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 3, 2019

Kore-eda directs in a manner that emphasizes performance over visual style, and the action seems set to the same casual rhythms as real life. But most importantly, he has empathy for his characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 21, 2019

[Kore-eda] knows how to give you a tonic for your soul when you most need it ... with scenes that are akin to granules of grace being fed piece by piece.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 10, 2018

It's arguably one of Koreeda's more schematic works, but this feels permissible when he's offering such an eloquent, almost literary, glance over his characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 3, 2018

It feels strangely trivial.

Full Review | Aug 8, 2018

Here there is no doubt characters have changed, but externally their behavior seems all but the same. The development is incremental and internalized.

Full Review | Jun 5, 2018

[Director Kore-eda Hirokazu's] work is no mere nostalgia act...

A most satisfying sweet domestic comedy.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jun 5, 2018

As the storm winds down and dawn approaches, you deeply care - because you can't predict, and neither can they - whether these family members will learn to grow up, let go and move on.

Full Review | Dec 29, 2017

After the Storm brilliantly deconstructs this self-destructive cycle over time. It patiently strips away male delusions of grandeur and focuses intensely on the responsibility of being mindful.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 19, 2017

All of these build up to being more than the sum of its parts. For anyone, being compared to Ozu is daunting, but Kore-eda needn't be ashamed, not with efforts like "After the Storm."

Full Review | Dec 19, 2017

It's a quiet piece, but resonant in its humanity and hope.

The hard part is that it takes work, which isn't quite a message we associate with movies but which remains, as with the rest of the film, true to life. The resulting work is beautiful, and strikingly human.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Dec 8, 2017

Breaking News

Review: Hirokazu Kore-eda delivers a quietly masterful family drama with ‘After the Storm’

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“After the Storm,” a sublimely simple family drama from the Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda, unfolds amid the sweltering heat of an unusually active Pacific typhoon season. In preparation for the 23rd rainstorm of the year, a recently widowed woman named Yoshiko (Kirin Kiki) asks her middle-aged son, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), to move a tangerine plant on her balcony — which he does, breaking a window in the process.

It’s an accident that, like much of what we see and hear on-screen, feels inevitable in retrospect. Both Ryota and the plant are tall, clumsy and, as Yoshiko chides him with characteristic bluntness, stubbornly slow to bear fruit. But they both have important roles to play as well, as this patient and generous film will reveal in due course.

Kore-eda, whose moving domestic dramas have been increasingly influenced by the great Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse, has a particularly deft and disarming way with metaphor. His characters here often speak of everyday objects — a late-blooming plant, a hot pot of stew, a scrap of handwriting — with an ease that, far from seeming lyrical or precious, instead feels like the plainest expression of what they mean.

“After the Storm” has the same matter-of-factness and the same temperamental aversion to overreach. Like the director’s earlier “Still Walking” (2009), in which Kiki and Abe also played a mother and son, the movie gently exposes a family’s past troubles and lingering regrets in a placid, present-tense register, finding pockets of revelation in a deceptively uneventful narrative.

At the center of the story is Ryota, a genial screw-up whose once-promising writing career has foundered since the publication of his first novel 15 years earlier. He now works as a private detective, spying on cheating spouses and using the photographic evidence as blackmail — a sleazy racket that he claims is merely research for his next book.

In reality, Ryota squanders what little he earns at the racetrack, to the barely concealed frustration of his ex-wife, Kyoko (Yoko Maki), who is raising their young son, Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa, soulfully confirming Kore-eda as one of the world’s finest directors of children). Turning on his raffish charm, Ryota tries to get back into Kyoko’s good graces and spend quality time with Shingo. He also visits Yoshiko, who ruefully observes that her husband was, in some ways, as inconsiderate and unsatisfying a spouse as Ryota was to Kyoko.

Parental sins and fractured family bonds are nothing new in Kore-eda’s oeuvre. Two of his best-known films — “Nobody Knows” (2004), a harrowing true-story portrait of childhood abandonment, and “Like Father, Like Son” (2013), a wrenching tale of two boys switched at birth — brilliantly exploit the tension between the extremity of their circumstances and the placid, almost perverse restraint of the director’s methods.

The lack of a similarly melodramatic hook — even the climactic typhoon of the title more or less behaves itself — may make “After the Storm” seem like a minor effort, when in fact it is the work of a filmmaker assured enough to hide his mastery in plain sight. Nothing is overemphasized, and nothing escapes his attention.

Kore-eda, serving as his own editor, sets his scenes to the gentle, unforced rhythm of everyday life (and also to the refrain of a dolorous but amusing score by singer-songwriter Hanaregumi). His characters are so sharply drawn and inhabited, their relationships delineated in such fine-grained detail, that their moments of mundane togetherness — sharing a meal, playing a game, taking shelter from the rain — reveal more about who they are than the most seismic dramatic shifts could.

Kiki, always gifted at playing women as impish as they are wise, imbues Yoshiko with grandmotherly warmth but also the piercing sorrow of a life lived with its own unmet longings. Maki, her soft, delicate features lined with a hard edge of disappointment, makes the practical-minded Kyoko sympathetic but hardly immune to criticism. (“You’re so calculating,” Ryota tells her. “No,” she replies. “It’s called planning your life.” They both have a point.)

Ryota is a charming slacker with his untidy hair and rascally, what-me-worry smile, but it’s Abe’s hulking 6-foot-2 frame — he towers over his costars — that makes the character seem like a literally overgrown child, something Kore-eda uses to subtly brilliant effect. For most of “After the Storm,” Ryota simply doesn’t fit in anywhere — not in his mother’s apartment, not in the bathtub, not in the lives of his ex-wife and son.

Kore-eda is too scrupulous a filmmaker to prescribe Ryota an easy redemptive arc or happy ending. Nonetheless, the lingering optimism that suffuses “After the Storm’s” closing scenes is honestly achieved; nothing on the surface has changed, but on a deeper level something has. The final shot is of Ryota walking away from the camera — still as tall as ever but now free, at ease and with a clear reason to keep going.

------------

‘After the Storm’

In Japanese with English subtitles

Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes

Playing: Laemmle’s Royal Theatre, West Los Angeles

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Review: “After the Storm,” a gentle drama of a fractured family

By David Morgan

March 18, 2017 / 12:18 PM EDT / CBS News

A divorced man’s attempts at reconciliation with his son (and with his own vision of himself as a father) are tossed into a quiet maelstrom of self-doubt, as he seeks redemption for himself from his fractured family, in Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s captivating drama, “After the Storm.”

One of the most humanist of directors, Kore-eda has created numerous affecting personal dramas (including “After Life,” “Nobody Knows” and “Still Walking”) which touch on troublesome family dynamics, the unpredictability of life, and the immutability of time. His best film, 2013’s “Like Father, Like Son,” tells the emotional story of a father who discovers that the son he’s raised was actually switched at birth at the hospital, leading to challenging decisions about his role as a parent, and the ethical minefield of potentially exchanging one boy for his real flesh-and-blood who’d been raised by others.

The responsibilities of fatherhood, and fending off feelings of personal failure, are at the heart of his latest film, “After the Storm.” Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), a once-promising novelist, is reduced to working for a detective agency, rationalizing his surveillance of cheating spouses as research for a new book.

But he is gambling away the time he could be spending with his son, after his wife, Kyoko (Yoko Maki) has divorced him. Soon Ryota is trailing her, effusive with questions to his son about the new man in her life.

But while ever-insufficient money is at the root of his deadening lifestyle (his gambling habits, and distaste for selling his talents to a manga publisher don’t ease those problems), Ryota is also struggling with the memories of his recently-deceased father, a gambler whose apparent diffidence towards Ryota colored his life. As Ryota engages in surreptitious tugs of wars with his sister (over money or personal responsibility), he rethinks his relationship with his parents, and begins to hope that his family might be made whole again.

Time -- as both a measure of ambition and legacy (“Men pay too much attention to expiration dates,” one character muses, about men’s obsessions over both women and mortality) -- is brought to bear in Ryota’s short, scheduled meetings with his son. And so is space; the distance between the two seems insurmountable. But when a violent storm keeps these individuals in close quarters, their defenses peel away, and possibilities for new beginnings suddenly emerge.

In this quiet and gentle film, the actors are consistently spot-on in unraveling the relationships between husband and wife, parents and children, which tend to define us no matter how much we resist. “Life is simple,” says Ryota’s mother, Yoshiko (an excellent Kirin Kiki), astonished at the wisdom of her own simple phrase. In what should come as no surprise, Kore-eda manages to turn a simple story into something deep, with resonance and heart.

“After the Storm” (distributed by Film Movement) is now playing in select cities, including New York City, Los Angeles, Pasadena, Calif., and Toronto, and will open later this month in San Francisco, Boulder, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere . In Japanese with English subtitles. Not rated. 117 mins.

To watch a trailer from “After the Storm” click on the video player below.

David Morgan is a senior editor at CBSNews.com and cbssundaymorning.com.

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