A Pale View of Hills (2025)

When getting back into writing these reviews, I could have quite easily imagined my first two Tuesday reviews would have been of Japanese films. After all, these are my free for all reviews whereas my Friday ones are for new releases. Anyway, here’s my second Friday review and the second time focusing on a Japanese film. This time it is Kei Ishikawa’s A Pale View of Hills (2025). Based on the book of the same name, the film tells the story of Etsuko, played by both Suzu Hirose and Yoh Yoshida, showing her life in 1950s Nagasaki and 1980s Britain, intertwining both and connecting her past and present and having her face past traumas.

This film I think is going to split opinion. Not in an extremely polarising way, its not thar kind of film. But I think some people will really connect with the story and the characters, buying into the emotional beats the film is presenting us with and finding some beauty in what is a rather sad film at its core. And I think other people will find it a little slow and struggling to connect with characters who don’t feel entirely like they have strong connections themselves. I, unfortunately, fall into the latter camp. I don’t want you to think that makes this a bad film. As I hope I put across in my initial statement, there is stuff here that I recognise as being effective in certain contexts for certain people, it just didn’t do it for me. What I will say is that it is a really well made film. It is not anything extravagant in terms of its shot choice, but it is shot well. And it has some beautiful colours throughout, which with the solid cinematography leads to some really beautiful shots throughout the film. So it is pretty film to look at, but outside of this it just didn’t really do much for me.