Super Happy Forever (2024)

Sano (Hiroki Sano) and his friend Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata) visit a coastal resort motel in the last days of its existence. Sano is clearly beside himself, walking around in something of a fugue, looking for a red ballcap lost there five years ago. Soon enough, we learn he has good reason for his state of mind, for he has lost his wife Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto) just a couple of weeks ago. The hotel and the town are where they first met five years ago, and Sano appears to still half be looking for Nagi, or signs of her passing.

After forty or so minutes, the film turns back to the past of five years ago. Now, shown from Nagi’s perspective, we see how the couple first met and learn to understand some of the echoes of their encounter left five years later during Sano’s return.

Beginning slowly and not terribly interested in explaining itself at first, Kohei Igarashi’s Super Happy Forever turns out to be a film about loss, love, the physical presence of the past in the now, and the small, hidden connections between people and places. It is also a love story told through absences: at first, we can only perceive the shape of Nagi’s absence in the now, Sano’s moments of short memories and the things about their relationship his behaviour hints at. But then, the flashback, while filling in some of these holes also doesn’t fill in any of the actual relationship between Sano and Nagi (which apparently wasn’t all that happy) – we’re only ever witness to its beginning and its aftermath, and none of the joy or pain in between.

There’s nothing sentimental about the film’s approach to this, or of the patness of esoteric bullshit Miyata has fled into, but nor is there any cynicism here. Instead, this is a film of genuine sadness, genuine love and a genuine longing for human presence and connectedness – coming together into a form that feels quite special, in a way that’s self-contained and lacks showiness, and never indulges in the painful overintellectualization arthouse cinema can fall into.