Cannes 2025: A Pale View of Hills movie review – Suzu Hirose, Fumi Nikaido lead adaptation

South China Morning Post

15-05-2025

3.5/5 stars
Towards the end of Kei Ishikawa's visually captivating new film A Pale View of Hills, Niki (Camilla Aiko) tells her mother, Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida), she shouldn't feel guilty about leaving Japan for Britain after the second world war. 'We all need to change,' she says.
For Etsuko, that comment rings very true: trapped by both the trauma of war and the tyranny of patriarchy, reinvention was perhaps Etsuko's only option to attain a more rewarding life.
But some of Ishikawa's changes to the 1982 novel on which his film is based, by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro – in which a middle-aged Japanese woman offers her daughter a montage of memories about her life as a meek homemaker in Japan in the 1950s – may come across as unnecessary.
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By amplifying the book's much more muted social commentary – a move encouraged by Ishiguro himself, who helped develop the screenplay and also serves as the executive producer of the film – Ishikawa somehow shifts the focus away from the protagonist's personal struggles.
He also waters down the intrigue which keeps Niki – and the audience – guessing about the truthfulness of Etsuko's recollections of her past.