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Suzu Hirose as a young Etsuko in “A Pale View of Hills”, adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel and 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. ©2025 A Pale View of Hills Film Partners.

Suzu Hirose has been busy. As one of Japan’s most prominent and prolific actresses, she is known for films like Hirokazu Kore-eda’s My Little Sister and The Third Murder, and Lee Sang-Il’s Rage and Wandering.

In 2024-25, she appeared in the lead roles of five films, two of which are coming to Toronto this autumn. One of the most eagerly anticipated films in the TIFF 2025 lineup is Kei Ishikawa’s adaptation of A Pale View of Hills, the debut novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. She also heads an all-star cast in Nobuhiro Doi’s Unreachable, based on a script by Yuji Sakamoto (Monster, First Kiss) to be screened as part of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre’s J-Film program in October.

A Pale View of Hills, like the novel, is a supple meditation on trauma, identity, and the subjective nature of memory. The prejudices faced by hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) are also braided into the narrative. The story spans two timelines: Nagasaki in 1952, following the atomic bombing, and Britain in the early 1980s.

Niki (Camilla Aiko) unexpectedly returns to her mother Etsuko’s (Yoh Yoshida) house in suburban England. She has quit university and is in a failing relationship with one of her professors. Her British father has passed away, and her half-sister, Keiko, from Etsuko’s previous marriage, has recently committed suicide. Etsuko is in the process of preparing the house for sale, and rooms are strewn with boxes of mementos and albums from her life in Nagasaki. For Etsuko, these trigger a swell of disquieting memories and also fire in Niki, a need to excavate her mother’s unspoken past. She begins to record an interview with Etsuko, initially for an article in support of the abolition of nuclear weapons, but it soon transitions into an interrogation of memory.

We meet Etsuko’s younger self (Suzu Hirose) in Nagasaki while she is pregnant with Keiko and married to her first husband, Jiro (Kouhei Matsushita). Etsuko is isolated and lonely, and a visit from her father-in-law, a disgraced professor, only serves to heighten the tension in the household. Etsuko turns her attention to Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido), a single mother living in genteel poverty in a shack across the river. Sachiko dreams of moving herself and her troubled daughter, Mariko, to America with “Frank”, her American G.I. lover. Etsuko and Sachiko develop an intense but unstable friendship. Etsuko quietly disapproves of Sachiko’s inattentive parenting, and a bond begins to form with Mariko. It is the memories of this particular summer that become the focus of Etsuko’s troubling dreams.

Suzu Hirose as Etsuko, and Fumi Nikaido as Sachiko in A Pale View of Hills. ©2025 A Pale View of Hills Film Partners

The film shifts gracefully between time periods, and Yoshida’s performance maps nicely onto Hirose’s portrayal of the younger Etsuko. Tomokazu Miura’s sympathetic turn as the father-in-law also impresses, and it is during their private conversations that we begin to see the intensity of Etsuko’s trauma.

While the scenes in the UK are well-acted and Aiko and Yoshida share good chemistry, the film really belongs to Hirose and Nikaido as the 1950s incarnations of Etsuko and Sachiko. Hirose’s gentle and open vulnerability betrays a complicated substrate of guilt, desperation, and intense containment. She cryptically references some unbearable betrayal she feels she committed during the bombing, but, when another character enters, she quickly lowers the curtain before we can hear her confession. Nikaido’s charismatic performance as the enigmatic Sachiko braids strands of aloofness, reckless despair, and wounded confidence into something mesmerizing. The interplay between these two is the beating heart of the film, and you can’t take your eyes off them.

As A Pale View of Hills moves to its conclusion, the toll trauma has taken on Etsuko’s memory and ability to process the past comes into stark relief. The film guards its mysteries carefully, and audiences will work to unravel them long after leaving the cinema. Coming on the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing, the story must also be considered in its broader context. Memory can collapse or reshape itself as a defense mechanism against trauma, and the film can also be interpreted as an investigation into Japan’s own struggle with memory, identity, and culpability in response to the Pacific War and its outcomes.

After A Man and Gukoroku-Traces of Sin, director Ishikawa adds another strong film to his resume and, in doing so, delivers one of 2025’s most affecting Japanese films.

Suzu Hirose, Hana Sugisaki, Kaya Kiyohara in Unreachable. ©2025 ”Unreachable“ Film Partners.

Unreachable also presents the viewer with a mystery. Misaki, Yuka, and Sakura (Suzu Hirose, Hana Sugisaki, Kaya Kiyohara) live together in a rambling old house in a corner of Tokyo. They have the rapport of siblings: sleeping in the same bedroom, sharing confidences, and brushing their teeth together in front of the mirror each morning, but they are not sisters.

The secret bond that has held them together in this strange isolation for 12 years is about to be challenged by unrequited love. To say more would require some significant spoilers. To its credit, the story delivers a “big reveal” in its opening 30 minutes that would be the closing note in most other films, then goes on to explore the implications of their situation.

It is a delicate, dreamlike fantasy built around luminous performances from three of Japan’s top young actresses, with Ryusei Yokohama (Kokuho, Faceless) thrown into the beguiling mix.

Photo credits:

©2025 A Pale View of Hills Film Partners

©2025 ”Unreachable“ Film Partners