Jour­ney to the Shore

Great claims are often made for the Japan­ese direc­tor Kiyoshi Kuro­sawa, and they often stem right back to his high-end tech­no chiller from 2001: Pulse. Yet, aside from his superb 2008 fam­i­ly melo­dra­ma, Tokyo Sonata, he’s a film­mak­er who appears to have more off days than he does on.

So what of Jour­ney to the Shore, his 2015 film which pre­miered to a cool response at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val? As a nar­ra­tive propo­si­tion, it is admit­ted­ly both intrigu­ing and invit­ing: what if some­one remade Jer­ry Zucker’s Ghost, but with­out all the kissy-kissy sop­pi­ness and potter’s wheel-based love ses­sions? The answer, it sad­ly tran­spires, is that the result will be ini­tial­ly rather nov­el, but even­tu­al­ly crush­ing­ly tedious.

Eri Fukatsu’s Mizu­ki is a lone­ly piano teacher who doesn’t bat an eye­lid when her hus­band (miss­ing pre­sumed dead) returns home as a ghost and, over a feast of fresh­ly steamed dumplings, asks her to join him on an a bizarre meta­phys­i­cal adven­ture across the coun­try­side. Kuro­sawa abstains from using spe­cial effects, forc­ing the view­er to cre­ate the ghost­ly dis­con­nect in their own mind. It’s an extreme­ly bold film­mak­ing choice which places an admirable amount of trust in the hands of the audi­ence, yet the direc­tor clear­ly feels that one rad­i­cal ges­ture is more than enough for a sin­gle fea­ture, and so the remain­der set­tles for sen­ti­men­tal soap opera.

The lethar­gy sets in quick­ly with a pro­longed and large­ly inci­dent-free road trip in which ques­tions about the husband’s spec­tral state are posed, and Mizu­ki gets to spend some time with a vari­ety of lov­ably eccen­tric ghosts, all of whom are also trapped in an earth-bound lim­bo. Clichés of wrestling with grief and accept­ing the fate of deceased lovers are ush­ered in as trite answers to the ques­tions that haven’t been asked, the film’s death­ly dull sec­ond half sug­gests that the direc­tor had giv­en up on try­ing to make things interesting.