It begins as many great films do: with a character peering through a window, their gaze landing on someone and fixing itself there — eyes widening in curiosity, interest, perhaps recognition.
The characters in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels have a tendency to unspool when faced with their Rube Goldberg prompt to do so, the three-act nature of their memories ripe for successful cinema adaptation. Ishiguro’s England-set “The Remains of the Day” was mounted by Merchant-Ivory in 1993 to much acclaim, and his boarding school existentialist sci-fi “Never Let Me Go” was emotively adapted to screen by Alex Garland and Mark Romanek in 2010. A Japanese-born British writer, Ishiguro used his lesser-celebrated early novels to examine his international heritage and identity, and it’s the first of these, “A Pale View of Hills,” that now sees a lavish Un Certain Regard-premiering adaptation.
Taking to the stage at the film’s Cannes premiere, Ishiguro noted that he wrote the source text when he was a mere 25 years old — “a very bad book” — but that cinema has “a long history of bad books making for wonderful films.” It was Kei Ishikawa who first approached Ishiguro about the project, ultimately writing, directing, and editing the film. A member of Bunbuku, a production house led by industry luminaries Hirokazu Kore–eda and Miwa Nishikawa, Ishikawa saw international recognition in 2022 with “A Man” — similarly a novel adaptation and psychological thriller — which premiered in the Horizons section at Venice.
Journalist Niki (Camilla Aiko) has returned to her family home following her sister’s suicide. She’s careful to talk around the topic with her mother, Etsuko (Yō Yoshida), but there’s another history that she’s here to explore. Niki has been assigned a feature on her personal connection to Nagasaki, but she doesn’t feel she has one — her parents left for England shortly before she was born. Etsuko recalls Sachiko, a friend she had when living in post-war Nagasaki, a woman whose appearance was at once striking and elusive. Ever more drawn to her, the young Etsuko finds her behaviors and attitudes changing.
“A Pale View of Hills” is a film of two halves, shifting — frustratingly leadenly — between past and present. The present day sequences mark Ishikawa’s English-language debut. The performances here are strong — Aiko especially brings a grounded believability to her role as a sharp but adrift university dropout getting to grips with her heritage. This is a Japanese co-production that understands what it is to exist in a British household space — tea and biscuits, cobwebs and all.
“A Pale View of Hills” is co-produced by the UK’s Number 9 films, who also had a hand in “Living,” Ishiguro’s London reimagining of Kurosawa’s “Ikiru.” The issue is much the same as “Living” — emotionally charged, switched-on performances can only do so much with stilted direction and an overly expository script. If you’re at home with the trappings of a BBC drama, “A Pale View’s” present-day sequences might work for you, but those affectations feel out of place on a big screen and an international stage.
In the recalled past, we’re introduced to the younger Etsuko (Suzu Hirose, a remarkable facial match for Yoshida) as she goes about her days in Nagasaki. What we’re given of her life outside of her interactions with a few core characters is intentionally thin, but the slightness leaves Ishikawa’s Nagasaki feeling less specific and more an identifiably “Japanese” set where the characters meet and talk. Lit in nostalgic, saturated hues that bathe the streets in a warm glow, “A Pale View of Hills” paints its city as a fantastical, imagined space, and in doing so appears to target an international, culturally-curious audience first, a domestic, familiarized audience second. When Ishiguro’s text engages the atomic history of Nagasaki and its effects, it’s troubling for these elements to be so brushed over and minimal in Ishikawa’s adaptation.
It’s an attractive aesthetic, but it also feels a little rote. The festival circuit has served up a string of glossy period pieces from the major Japanese studios this year, and Ishikawa’s arrives just after Negishi Kichitaro’s “Yasuko: Songs of Days Past” at International Film Festival Rotterdam — which likewise features co-lead Suzu Hirose at its centre.
Starring opposite Hirose, as the mysterious Sachiko, is Fumi Nikaido — clad in striking purples and pinks against muted surroundings. Experienced in portraying ice queens with a dangerous streak (“Why Don’t You Play in Hell?”, “Tezuka’s Barbara”), Nikaido’s sharp gaze contrasts exquisitely with Hirose’s soft, open expressions. The chemistry between the two is compelling, but dense dialogue is foregrounded over much in the way of visual flair or dynamic blocking, every conversation following a straightforward shot-reverse-shot setup in a room, park, or street. You’re never sold on the idea that these characters live and breathe like their present day counterparts — they are archetypal period drama figures moving like meeples from plot beat to plot beat.
The film’s saving grace is the climactic montage that ushers in its pivotal twist — which evokes the films of Nobuhiko Obayashi in its vivid palette and Shinji Somai’s seminal “Moving” in its catharsis — evidencing Ishikawa as a sharply affective image-maker. It’s easy to see why the director was drawn to this story, continuing threads of identity and memory that he keenly explored in “A Man” and “Traces of Sin”, but he’s ill-suited to a film so repetitive and literary in its domestic duologues. “A Pale View of Hills” doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, but it’s worth that first curious glance.
Grade: B-
“The Pale View of the Hill” premiered in Un Certain Regard at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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