21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Unreachable movie review: Suzu Hirose, Hana Sugisaki and Kaya Kiyohara in baffling drama
2/5 stars
With three of Japan's most accomplished actresses under 30 – Suzu Hirose, Hana Sugisaki and Kaya Kiyohara – performing under the assured stewardship of director Nobuhiro Doi, and with a script by Cannes Film Festival award winner Yuji Sakamoto (
Monster ), supernatural drama Unreachable should have been an easy win.
But this persistently baffling tale of three young ghosts navigating modern-day Tokyo is dead on arrival.
Fantasies dealing with the dead and their attempts to interact with the living are not only commonplace in cinema; among them are some of the very best and most emotionally resonant films ever made.
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From Ugetsu to
Rouge to Ghost, stories that reach across the ethereal plain tap into our most primal and profound feelings of love, regret, grief and loneliness. But in order for them to work, certain ground rules, however fanciful, must be laid down and adhered to. That is not the case here.
Misaki (Hirose), Yuuka (Sugisaki), and Sakura (Kiyohara) share a house in the Tokyo suburbs and commute daily to their jobs or classes. Within the film's first few moments, however, we learn that all three girls are dead, victims of a violent attack at their primary school more than a decade earlier.
