140 min | NR | January 29, 2021 | Film Movement
A married couple adopts a baby boy after years of failed fertility treatment. Six years later a young woman appears at their door, claims to be his birth mother, and asks for money or her son back. Naomi Kawase takes a thriller premise and lets it dissolve into something slower and sadder.
Satoko and Kiyokazu Kurihara want a child and cannot have one. Fertility treatment fails. They adopt an infant boy through a private agency that hands him to them as a newborn. Six years later a young woman calls and then appears at their door, claiming to be Hikari, the boy’s birth mother, and demanding money or the child. Kawase sets this up as a thriller and then walks away from the thriller. The film is about who earns the title of mother, and it answers that the title belongs to labor and not to blood.
Hiromi Nagasaku plays Satoko as a woman whose tenderness hardens into vigilance the moment her family is threatened. She spends the early stretch radiant with new motherhood and the later one braced for loss. Arata Iura plays Kiyokazu as a husband who takes the infertility diagnosis as his own failure and carries it without complaint. Aju Makita plays Hikari and gets the widest arc. She moves from a middle schooler in first love to a girl sent away in shame to the hollowed-out young woman who turns up at the Kuriharas’ door, and Makita makes the three stages read as one continuous unraveling. Miyoko Asada plays Shizue Asami, who runs the adoption agency from a remote island, and gives the film its plainspoken moral center.
Naomi Kawase directs from a script she wrote with Izumi Takahashi, adapting Mizuki Tsujimura’s novel. Kawase shoots in natural light and lets the camera drift toward sunlight through leaves, water on skin, and hands at work. The structure abandons chronology and spends long stretches in flashback before circling back to the standoff in the present. She favors dissolves and lingering inserts over cuts that drive a scene forward. The technique makes the film feel observed rather than plotted, which deepens the emotion and slackens the tension at the same time.
The film treats every character with the same patience, which is both its virtue and its limit. Kawase refuses to make a villain of the birth mother or a saint of the adoptive parents. That generosity costs the film momentum, and the two halves of the story sit side by side longer than the drama requires. By the time the present-day confrontation resolves, the film has already told you how it feels about motherhood, and the ending confirms that feeling rather than complicating it. True Mothers is humane and patiently observed. It would cut deeper if it trusted its own restraint enough to stop sooner.