Review: I’m Still Here

Posted on August 7, 2025 by philipbrasor

It’s easy to see why Walter Salles’s adaptation of Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir of the abduction and murder of his father in the 1970s by the Brazilian authorities won the Oscar for Best International Feature. It’s earnest in its outrage at the abject cruelty of Brazil’s fascist state at the time, while delving deep into the resulting turmoil that wrecked Paiva’s family, in particular his mother, whose POV the film assumes once her husband is taken away. Nevertheless, while the movie feels painfully personal, it doesn’t say anything beyond the obvious, that what happened to Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) was an unforgivable crime and that Eunice Paiva’s (Fernanda Torres) campaign to uncover the truth was unrelenting and fierce. I’m Still Here is a model template for that subgenre of films that deal with authoritarianism as it affects individuals. 

Salles is thorough in his setup, showing the happy, successful middle class life of the Paivas, who have five children. Rubens is an architect who once held a seat in the national assembly, and while his political views remain under wraps, it’s obvious he opposes the present regime and there are hints he is helping to support underground elements opposed to the government. But for most of the first hour, the script dwells on domestic matters, in particular budding filmmaker daughter Vera’s (Valentina Herszage) move to the UK to study. It is while Vera is away that agents of the government arrive at the Paiva home and subsequently take him to their offices for questioning. Apparently, he is suspected of passing information to persons considered enemies of the state, though this intelligence isn’t revealed until later. It is the last time his family will see him. Eunice is also brought in for questioning, and here Salles cleverly and effectively shows what she is up against, namely, a state apparatus that uses exhaustion to break their prey, with the sounds of torture and suffering echoing down the damp, dark hallways of the facility. But she’s released, and for the rest of the film she works to find out where her husband was taken and what happened to him. 

The movie then becomes a kind of procedural, with Eunice accessing every resource at her disposal. She finds out what she needs to know, all the while holding some things back from her children, who she feels are too young to handle the truth, although they surely know their father is not coming back. This development is laced through with nostalgic moments as a means of contrasting years of uncertainty with a time of love and stability. Meanwhile, Eunice goes back to school, becomes a professor and a defender of indigenous people’s rights, as her work to explain the crimes of the former administration make her into a minor celebrity. In fact, a little more distinction between these various roles would have been welcome. As it is, they are simply presented as adjuncts to her central role as mother and widow, which, as admirable as that is, shortchanges her accomplishments. 

In Portuguese and English. Opens Aug. 8 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

I’m Still Here home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Videofilmes/RT Features/Globoplay/Conspiracao/MACT Productions/Arte France Cinema

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Review: The Voices of the Silenced and A Compassionate Spy

Posted on August 2, 2025 by philipbrasor

Co-director Park Maeui worked with her veteran documentarian mother, Park Soo-nam, on The Voices of the Silenced, a detailed review of the latter’s life and work as the former digitizes that work, which was originally shot in 16mm. Both Parks are Japan-resident Koreans (zainichi) who speak Japanese throughout the film. Soo-nam, second generation zainichi, switched from writing to filmmaking in the 70s and has almost exclusively covered the zainichi experience, focusing on Japanese historical matters and incidents—the 1923 Kanto earthquake, the Battle of Okinawa, the coal mine of Gunkanjima during WWII, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the “comfort women” issue—from the point of view of Korean residents and immigrants, which has been neglected by Japanese historians. 

Along the way the elder Park discusses her own matters and incidents, as when she felt rejected by both North and South Korea because of her uncompromising attitude, her fear of “turning Japanese,” and her fierce feminism, which has angered Koreans as much as Japanese (she has never married). On a more immediate tip, Soo-nam is going blind, so the digitizing mission becomes vital, occasionally sparking disagreements between mother and daughter that add a bit of drama to the historical recollections, of which the so-called Komatsugawa Incident (made famous as a feature film by Nagisa Oshima) that resulted in the false murder conviction and execution of a young Korean man in Japan, merits the most screen time, since it basically sparked Soo-nam’s journalistic career. 

The doc is, in turns, melancholically nostalgic and bitter, and at two-and-a-half hours could use a bit more editing as the Parks tend to go over some of the material several times. If The Voices of the Silenced draws more attention to the work of Park Soo-nam, which has been neglected by the West, then it will have served a valuable function.

Steve James’ documentary, A Compassionate Spy, also covers a subject more people should know about: How the late American scientist Ted Hall, the youngest person to work on the Manhattan Project, leaked atomic secrets to the Soviets during and after the war and essentially got away with it. The title refers to Hall’s motives: After witnessing what the bomb could do he believed it was too dangerous a weapon to be solely in the hands of the U.S., which he thought would surely use it again, probably against the Soviets in an inevitable future conflict. He committed treason, in other words, to save millions of people from annihilation. Though many will surely take issue with this position—and James interviews several individuals who do exactly that, including the son of Hall’s co-conspirator—in a sense, Hall’s prescience has been somewhat justified since no atomic bombs have been detonated for belligerent purposes since Nagasaki. 

Most of the film centers on the testimony of Hall’s wife, Joan, who explains her husband’s gentle, philosophical mien and their life together. Both were avid political leftists who sympathized with Communist doctrine while acknowledging the horrors of Stalinism. Early on, the FBI caught on to Hall’s actions and did what they could to bring him in, but his rigid stoicism confounded them. He was impossible to ruffle, and while Joan insists he never lied in his life, he managed to put up a front under fierce interrogation that couldn’t be breached. In a sense, he was saved by his intellect. Offered a teaching and research position at Cambridge, he moved his family to the UK in the 50s and stayed there the rest of his life, and while the American authorities enlisted British intelligence to continue pressuring him, they were never able to make anything stick. Certainly the most dramatic sequence in the film is Joan’s recollection of the sickness of the soul she and her husband suffered when the Rosenbergs were executed. Whatever crimes the Rosenbergs actually committed (Joan thinks the information they passed on to the Soviets was insignificant) the Halls felt the Rosenbergs were punished for what Ted had actually done and were just convenient scapegoats. 

James supplements the Halls’ tale with a history of the changing attitude in the U.S. toward the Soviet Union from the war years to the 80s as a means of showing how fickle official policy was while Ted Hall’s basic tenets remained unchanged—he was always on the side of humanity. In that sense, James sees Hall’s decisions, which he never regretted, as strictly moral ones, and tends to sidestep the legal questions. The narrative is deepened by input from the couple’s two surviving daughters (a third died in an accident at a young age), who inherited their parents’ leftist views but didn’t learn about their father’s secret activities until they were adults. What they have to say about his commitment to his principles may be the film’s most effective advocacy of its point-of-view, because emotions tend to win out every time. 

The Voices of the Silenced, in Japanese, English and Korean, now playing in Tokyo at Polepole Higashi Nakano (03-3371-0088).

A Compassionate Spy now playing in Tokyo at Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211).

The Voices of the Silenced home page in Japanese

A Compassionate Spy home page in Japanese

A Compassionate Spy photo (c) Participant Film

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Review: Kneecap

Posted on August 1, 2025 by philipbrasor

Sort of a musical biopic and sort of a piss-take on musical biopics, Rich Peppiatt’s movie about the titular Irish-language rap group messes with the audience’s expectations as he fashions a comedy of ill manners to make a point about how rebelliousness breeds contempt in the right foes. Michael Fassbender makes a clever cameo as Arlo, an IRA member who learned Irish Gaelic during a prison sentence and whose son, Naoise, is one of the rappers in Kneecap, a group that has, since this movie’s initial release, continued to piss people off in new ways, most lately by supporting the Palestinian cause. In the movie, Naoise (or Moglai Bap) and his partner, Liam (or Mo Chara), rebel in a more conventional way, by dealing drugs, chiefly ketamine, and when the British police of Belfast arrest Naoise he refuses to speak English, so the cops, or “peelers,” as the nominally Catholic youth call them, have to hire a translator. In this case, that’s JJ (or DJ Provai), a school teacher as square as a milk carton. Eventually, JJ is shown how his own advocacy of the Irish language makes him a natural enemy of the unionists and the Brits and when he discovers a cache of rap lyrics, in Irish, penned by the two troublemakers, he encourages them to put them to music. As it happens, he’s a recording engineer hobbyist and ends up becoming the duo’s baclava-sporting DJ. Kneecapping, a form of brutal punishment made infamous by the IRA, is what they decide to call themselves, thus taking the piss in an altogether novel way.

Most of the movie plays out like a Guy Ritchie crime actioner, a decision that Peppiatt knows is more effective in putting across the group’s themes than a political diatribe would. Moreover, Kneecap’s own antics are hardly models of uprightness. Their drug use is extreme, their criminal activities wanton, and their sexual adventures somewhat debasing for all involved, but in the end they work to place the group in a tradition of righteous hooliganism against an oppressive establishment, though it’s a tradition that Arlo may not approve of with his older definition of rebelliousness. In fact, Kneecap, once they start to garner a fan base, find their real enemy is not the British police but rather an organization called Radical Republicans Against Drugs, a neat summation of the my-way-or-the-highway extremism of classical IRA sentiment. Then there’s Liam’s affair with a Protestant girl from a good family, Georgia (Jessica Reynolds), who gets off sexually on the frisson created by the conflict between their respective cultures, whether political or aesthetic. 

Kneecap the movie is more interested in entertainment than in edification, so I imagine most of the biographical elements are bullshit. And yet as an advertisement for the trio’s own music and artistic attitude it works exceedingly well by arbitrating for Irish pride without making it seem like something to be proud of. The movie takes it for granted that British imperialism is bad, and if you don’t agree, well they’ve got plenty of epithets for you that you will never understand. 

In English and Irish Gaelic. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Kneecap home page in Japanese

photo (c) Kneecap Films Limited, Screen Market Research Limited t/a Wildcard and The British Film Institute 2024

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Media watch: Former maiko reveals a dark side of traditional Japanese arts

Posted on July 31, 2025 by philipbrasor

One of the aspects of the Johnny & Associates sexual abuse scandal that made it even more disturbing was the notion that the media knew for years about the abuse and said nothing. It almost seemed as if most media outlets almost expected the abuse. That’s because the entertainment world is rife with it, and not just in Japan. The #MeToo movement, after all, pretty much emerged from Hollywood, where women were expected to offer themselves as sexual objects in order to get ahead in show business. It’s a tradition, you might say, and in Japan that tradition goes back centuries with many types of gei (art forms).

It therefore should not have been surprising at all when a 26-year-old former maiko submitted a report to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in January outlining the “slave-like” working conditions of her profession, mainly in terms of providing intimate services to customers. Maiko practice traditional Japanese performance arts such as dancing, singing, and playing instruments for private customers. Some people refer to them as “apprentice geisha,” since maiko are typically very young. In her report, the woman, Kiyoha Kiritaka, described some of the tasks she was given by her superiors that should be considered illegal since she was a minor at the time.

An interview with Kiritaka appeared in the July 8 digital edition of the weekly magazine Aera. She explained how when she started junior high school, her dream was to someday become involved in the theater. Hearing this, an acquaintance of her mother, who often visited the entertainment districts of Kyoto called hanamachi, suggested she become a maiko and said she could make a recommendation with one of the “houses” (okiya) that trained maiko. Her mother thought it was a good idea and, wanting to please her, Kiritaka took up the offer.

She then essentially went through an interview process with the head mistress of the okiya. There are no contracts in the maiko world. You are simply accepted and then given an allowance during the training period, which is followed by a kind of internship. Kiritaka made her debut as a maiko when she was 16. 

When asked by Aera what her biggest impression was after making her debut, Kiritaka said it was the sexual harassment, which was rampant in the ozashiki, or venues where maiko entertain guests, usually in exclusive restaurants or Japanese inns. Customers, almost always males, regularly touched her breasts and buttocks and placed their hands inside her kimono. Though it made her uncomfortable, there was nothing she could do, since the mistress of her okiya told her that the customer is king. She was essentially told to get over it if she didn’t like, because the touching is part of the job. But it got worse.

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Review: Until Dawn

Posted on July 31, 2025 by philipbrasor

Another video game adaptation, and this one really feels like one in the way it keeps returning to a starting point. The plot structure, however, is very contrived and not particularly original. A group of young friends drive into a secluded wooded area to try and find out what happened to the sister of one of them, Clover (Ella Rubin). The sister disappeared a year previously. Being pretty bad at this detective thing they ask the first person they meet, a creepy gas station clerk who says that a number of people have gone missing in the area and that they should check out one mysterious house up the way. This being your standard horror movie, that’s exactly what they do, and find themselves trapped in the house, which at first seems abandoned. 

The gimmick is that they can’t leave the property and can only escape if they survive until dawn, a difficult proposition given the various creatures that emerge from nowhere to slaughter them. But they keep being reborn to go through the whole horror again per Groundhog Day. This structure allows the director, David F. Sandberg, to sample all the possible slasher and occult methods that have been introduced over the years. If the movie lacks real suspense it’s not because Sandberg’s timing is off, but rather that most of the gruesome killings are telegraphed beforehand in ways you’ve come to expect by simply watching these kinds of movies. There’s a saturation point, even for people like me who don’t like horror movies that much. 

What interested me to a certain extent was the logic behind the supernatural elements. It’s obvious Clover’s sister ended up in the house and was somehow absorbed into it over time. Victims get caught in the death loop and end up becoming monsters themselves…or something like that. The deaths themselves aren’t so gruesome as they are ironic. In one scene, the various members of the search team figure out how many lives they’ve already spent and how many more they have left before the point of no return. So, of course, they try to isolate themselves in a bathroom and just wait out the night, but you know what happens next. Until Dawn is a fairly compelling gloss on the haunted house theme, but its mechanics are a bit too mechanical.

Opens August 1 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Until Dawn home page in Japanese

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Review: All We Imagine as Light

Posted on July 25, 2025 by philipbrasor

The title of Indian director Payal Kapadia’s Cannes-winning first fiction feature is explained near the end when a character talks about working in a dark place for days on end. It gets to the point, he says, where light is only something you can imagine. This description more or less characterizes the lives of the three principal characters, who are stuck in a kind of existential limbo owing to the fact that they are women in a social milieu that doesn’t fully recognize their needs. But the movie could have easily borrowed the title from one of V.S. Naipaul’s novels, The Enigma of Arrival, in that these three women, co-workers in a hospital, are, like the hordes of commuters that become a visual leitmotif throughout the film, non-natives of the city where they live, Mumbai. Kapadia emphasizes the impermanence of a metropolis this big and varied, not just with the situations of Prabha (Kani Kusruti), the hospital’s head nurse, Anu (Divya Prabha), a young nurse-receptionist, and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cook on the verge of retirement, but in the struggles of everyone else we meet, including a doctor (Azeez Nedumangad) who is sweet on Prabha but also is considering moving back to his home town because he cannot master Hindi (“Why is the word for ‘yesterday’ the same as the word for ‘tomorrow’?”), and Anu’s secret boyfriend, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), a Muslim man who avoids contemplating a future without the Hindu woman he loves. And yet Mumbai is irresistible in Kapadia’s rendering, a swirling carnival of sensation that not only confounds one’s best laid plans but invigorates the fitful imagination of the title. 

The plot unspools like a telenovela. Prabha cannot return the handsome doctor’s affections because she is married, having been forced some years ago by her parents into an arranged union, after which her husband moved alone to Germany for work and has since almost completely severed contact, leaving her in a constant state of legal and emotional uncertainty. Anu (Divya Prabha) keeps her affair with Shiaz hidden from all around her, including Prabha, her new roommate who, it is implied, would surely disapprove. Meanwhile, her parents back in her own home town ply her with possible matches. Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), relatively uneducated but politically savvy, has become bureaucratically non-existent since her husband died without leaving documentary proof of their relationship. When her apartment of 22 years is targeted for redevelopment by a powerful construction company, she is left not just homeless but condemned to a kind of unofficiated netherland. While the movie lingers in Mumbai the three stories remain connected through casual interactions, but when Prabha and Anu help Pravaty move back to her coastal home village to resettle, the three women are offered the chance to reassess their lives away from the mad hustle of the city, with each arriving at a truth they can at least live with. 

Prabha’s magical realist epiphany near the end, after she saves a stranger from drowning, is particularly ingenious in explicating the character’s means of escaping total despair. Though Kapadia methodically and effectively shows how these women have become stuck in the roles they’ve been given by their respective cultures, she subsequently revels in how they discover the inner strength necessary to transcend those roles and achieve grace on their own terms. All We Imagine as Light is a miracle of dramatic empathy. 

In Hindi, Malayalam and Marathi. Now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645).

All We Imagine as Light home page in Japanese

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Review: When It Melts

Posted on July 24, 2025 by philipbrasor

Based on a novel, Veerle Baetens’ movie about a young woman who has never gotten over a teenage trauma has an unsettling allure at first, since the source of the trauma remains hidden. That’s not to say it can’t be easily discerned, given the screenplay’s device of parallel storylines, one in the “present,” where Eva (Charlotte De Bruyne), leaves her home in Brussels to attend a party in her rural home town with a large block of ice, and the other when Eva was 13 (Rosa Marchant, who looks remarkably like an adolescent version of De Bruyne) and hanging out with two older boys, Tim (Anthony Vyt) and Laurens (Matthijs Meertens), playfully calling themselves the 3 Musketeers. Though there’s nothing wrong with this structure if you’re going to show how the past affects the present, Baetens’ methodology is almost shamelessly transparent, as each facet of Eva’s current psychological torment is telegraphed by overly ominous clues from the past.

Part of the problem is that the setup is overloaded. Young Eva’s home life is fraught with anxiety, as her short-tempered father and alcoholic mother constantly clash over every little thing. Eva naturally turns toward her two male friends, who are at the age when their attraction to girls make them unreliable comrades. They recruit Eva, whose relative lack of physical development makes her “look more like 10 than 13,” as someone comments, to lure older girls to their barn lair, where they play a riddle game to get these girls to remove their clothes. Eva means to please, and when Tim, whose own trauma involves the recent death of his beloved brother in a farm accident, turns surly she tries to placate him by making friends with a pretty conceited girl who is spending the summer in town with an older relative against her will. Her plan is to offer the girl up to Tim. As they like to say, one thing leads to another, but in a rather obvious way.

It’s clear early on that Eva is returning to her hometown with notions of revenge, as passive-aggressive as those notions may be. It’s almost too perfect that she will be attending a function being held by Tim in honor of his late brother. The reason for the block of ice becomes apparent early on in a clumsy reveal that was probably more subtle in the book, but in any case the movie advances toward its horrible denouement in a plodding manner. The heavy-handedness doesn’t necessarily blunt the power of the story, but it makes it feel more manipulative than dramatic. 

In Dutch. Opens July 25 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

While It Melts home page in Japanese

photo (c) Savage Film-PRPL-Versus Production 2023

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Review: Elevation

Posted on July 23, 2025 by philipbrasor

Monster movies and so-called post-apocalyptic fiction are usually predicated on high-concept gimmicks. Sometimes the gimmick has a gloss of scientific credibility, such as the theory in The Last of Us that a killer fungus which has taken over the world emerged because of global warming; but in most other cases it’s an arbitrary convenience, like the idea in the Quiet Place movies that the murderous extra-terrestrials have super-accurate hearing but no visual capability. These phenomena thus become the overriding premise for all plot considerations. In Elevation, the insect-like monsters come from the ground, and the gimmick is that they cannot pass above 6,000 feet in elevation, which is why all of earth’s survivors live above that altitude. Director George Nolfi does an excellent job of creating a world that adheres to this premise without really making it believable. Why 6,000 feet? Why do the monsters only attack humans and no other life forms? Toward the end, we are offered something like answers to these questions, but they only bring up more questions.

The setting is the Rockies, where Will (Anthony Mackie) lives with his 11-year-old son, Hunter (Danny Boyd Jr.), who, in the opening scene, sneaks below the danger line just for the opportunity to see how others might be living. It’s a poignant gesture that shows how isolation eats at the soul, especially for a little kid who lost his mother to the monsters, called reapers, after they emerged 3 years earlier. Though he just barely makes it back to the sparsely populated town where they live, he has another life-threatening problem: a respiratory condition that requires medicine that is almost out, thus requiring Will to venture to the city of Boulder in order to raid a hospital. In the end, he’s accompanied by two women, a hard-drinking physicist named Nina (Morena Baccarin), who spends her days testing a new type of ammunition she hopes will be effective against the so-far bullet-proof reapers; and Katie (Maddie Hasson), a stubborn outdoorsy type who is younger than Will and seems to have a beef with the older, endlessly cynical Nina. The bulk of Elevation involves these three trying to reach their destination and without passing below the safe line so as not to attract the attention of the reapers, and Nolfi is adept at ramping up the suspense without getting carried away. Along the way, the three principals are given ample opportunity to explicate their back stories, thus adding even more poignancy to their imperiled quest. 

For all the skill and intelligence that’s gone into the production, Elevation still can’t quite shake the implausibility of its central idea, even with a final segment reveal that seems intent on doing that. In many ways it’s better than its ilk, but the fact that it belongs to an ilk that’s so ubiquitous in the first place only means it has a lot to overcome. 

Opens July 25 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831). 

Elevation home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 6000 Feet, LLC

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Media watch: Sanseito’s draft constitution a blueprint for repression and control

Posted on July 19, 2025 by philipbrasor
Campaign poster for Sanseito

The Upper House election campaign has been dominated by an unusual issue: foreign residents of Japan. The upstart Sanseito Party, whose motto is “Japanese People First,” has made it one of the planks of their platform, saying that foreign residents enjoy privileges that Japanese people do not. The media has jumped on the issue since it’s more interesting that taxes, inflation, and defense budgets, and a fair portion of the public has seemingly been persuaded to find merit in the discussion. Consequently, the current government has already formed an “administrative body” to address the public’s concerns over foreigners in Japan. 

Sanseito’s other policy proposals have received less coverage, but several media have studied the party’s draft Constitution, which Sanseito would endeavor to implement so as to replace the current Constitution if it ever became the ruling party. That’s a lot more ambitious than the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s Constitutional dreams, which are merely to amend the current charter so as to realize some of the LDP’s long-range goals and eliminate the American influence that has permeated the Constitution since it was drafted during the postwar occupation. 

However, the media outlet that has looked at the draft document more carefully than any other is Akahata, the news organ of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP). Given how a good portion of the cognoscenti feel about the JCP, Akahata’s views are likely not going to be talked about much, but they bear scrutiny. In a nutshell, Sanseito’s Constitution is a direct throwback to prewar Emperor Worship and calls to mind the authoritarian policies that persisted during the early Showa era, when Japan was spoiling for war in its bid to dominate Asia. Nowadays, such policies would need to be approved through the mechanisms of a nominal democracy, but the Sanseito Constitution spells it out conveniently.

In essence, Sanseito’s Constitution prescribes for the people of Japan responsibilities rather than rights, meaning it’s the total opposite in purpose from the current American-dictated Constitution, which starts out defining the status of the Emperor as being merely a symbol of the nation and its people. Sanseito goes further, stating that the Emperor is the ruler of Japan on account of his divine nature. More specifically, in Article 3, the Emperor approves the prime minister and all Cabinet members, which the present Constitution also prescribes, but only as a formality. Sanseito implies that the Emperor can deny government selections, thus giving him political power that the current Constitution does not grant. In addition, sovereignty is invested in the state, which at first glance would seem to be similar in meaning to the current Constitution since it doesn’t invest sovereignty in the Emperor. But as Akahata points out, the current Constitution actually invests sovereignty in the people, not the state, because Japan is a democracy. Making the state the sovereign transfers all power to the government without necessarily gaining the approval of the people.

As for rights, the only one (kenri) mentioned in Sanseito’s Constitution is in Article 8, which guarantees the right of all Japanese people to “enjoy healthy, culturally rich lives,” a purposely amorphous pronouncement that can be interpreted almost any way. There are no mentions of respect for individual autonomy, equality under the law, freedom of expression, freedom of academic pursuit, or any of the other rights guaranteed by the current Constitution. Instead, the document stresses obligations that are deemed inseparable from civic life.

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Review: Immaculate

Posted on July 17, 2025 by philipbrasor

It’s surprising that there hasn’t been more cinematic glosses on Rosemary’s Baby considering how irresistible is the notion of a child born of physical Satanic paternity, but this son-of-a-nun horror story isn’t much of an addition to the sub-genre. For the sake of not spoiling the fun I won’t go too deeply into the story, but suffice to say that the intention of the project depicted is not to produce an heir to the devil, but rather to get Christ back into the world via modern technology. In fact, part of the problem with the premise is how exactly this sleight-of-hand is carried out and why exactly it goes so wrong.

Sydney Sweeney plays only slightly against her publicized hype as Cecilia, a young American woman who, thanks to surviving a perilous childhood accident, decides to dedicate her life to God. For reasons that only become clear much later, she decides to take her vows at a convent in Italy, despite the fact that she speaks no Italian. Upon arrival she meets an array of colorful residents, including the cynical Sister Isabelle (Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi) and the friendly but obviously intimidated Sister Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli). Naturally, there’s an authoritarian Mother Superior (Dora Romano) and a kindly, over-solicitous head priest, Father Tedeschi (Alvaro Morte), thus providing plenty of characters on which to project Cecilia’s wavering hold on her faith, which is tested by various crises, including the violent death of a fellow nun and visions of a red-masked coven. After Cecilia finally takes her vows the mysteries grow more threatening, culminating in a miracle pregnancy that everyone seems to have expected except, of course, Cecilia, who still insists she’s a virgin. 

Director Michael Mohan and writer Andrew Lobel set up some interesting ideas without taking advantage of them once it’s revealed that Cecilia is with child, in particular the peculiar relationships among the novices and the nature of the convent, where elderly nuns go to live out their last days. Though neither of these ideas are necessary to fortify the horror prerogatives of the film, they could have been developed in such a way as to make Cecilia’s dilemma richer and more involving. I’m all for movies that portray the Catholic Church as a bastion of evil purpose, but it needs to be handled with more imagination than this. 

In English and Italian. Opens July 18 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Immaculate home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024, BBP Immaculate, LLC

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