In short: One Day, You Will Reach the Sea (2022)

Even years later, Mana (Yukino Kishii) hasn’t been able to emotionally let go of her friend Sumire (Minami Hamabe) who disappeared during the tsunamis of 2011. In flashbacks, the film shows their friendship as well as the course of Mana’s grief that may eventually end in some kind of healing through Mana’s eyes. Eventually, we’ll also witness some of the same scenes from Sumire’s perspective.

Ryutaro Nakagawa’s film is aesthetically quite typical of this sort of Japanese artsy fare, with decidedly pretty photography, and using as little dialogue as is necessary. The film’s rhythm is slow and thoughtful, with shots that go much longer than most American filmmakers outside of explicitly slow cinema circles would even dare, and scenes that take their time, but also have a point in taking their time.

This is, after all, a film about the quiet moments, about silence, about the things not said yet still expressed; also, a film about queer longing and desire that can’t or won’t be expressed or fulfilled, not in a high level dramatic or hand-wringing tragical way – after the films of his I’ve seen, I doubt Nakagawa believes in that sort of thing or at the very least has very little interest in it – but one that feels in keeping with the characters’ nature, Mana’s painful interiority, as well as Sumire’s inability to express anything like an authentic self directly.

If you let yourself fall into the film’s rhythm, you’ll probably find quite a bit of emotional truth and depth to much of what is happening (or not happening) on screen, in Nakagawa’s calm and quiet method for lending a voice to people whose truths are very often not voiced, while keeping to the tone that fits them. From time to time, particularly in the final act, there are moments where the emotional honesty One Day aims at may feel bordering on the kitschy or sentimental to some, but I prefer to think Nakagawa is just being the kind of genuine here that doesn’t care if you think he’s getting sentimental or not. I, for my part, found myself deeply moved by much of the film, its care for little gestures and silences, the quiet and deeply human performances by Kishii and Hamabe, and its sense for the intersections of editing rhythms and the rhythms of human emotions.