115 min | NR | September 17, 2021 | Kino Lorber
A silk merchant in wartime Kobe returns from Manchuria carrying proof of an atrocity and a plan to expose it. His wife must decide whether the man she loves is a hero or a traitor using her as cover. Kiyoshi Kurosawa turns the marriage into a minefield.
Kobe, 1940. Yusaku Fukuhara runs a silk trading company and shoots amateur films for fun. His wife Satoko lives a comfortable life as Japan marches toward war. Yusaku travels to Manchuria and returns carrying knowledge of an atrocity he means to expose to the world. The film presents itself as a wartime thriller. It is really a study of a marriage tested by one partner’s decision to risk everything for a principle the other does not yet understand.
Yu Aoi plays Satoko as a woman who must decide whether her husband is a patriot, a traitor, or a man using her as cover. Aoi shifts between adoration and suspicion without telegraphing either. She lets Satoko perform loyalty in public while her eyes track every inconsistency at home. Issey Takahashi plays Yusaku with a merchant’s polished calm that never reveals how much he is hiding. Masahiro Higashide plays Yasuharu Tsumori, the military police officer and childhood friend, with a courtesy that curdles into menace as the investigation tightens. The performances keep the audience uncertain about who is deceiving whom.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa directs from a script he wrote with Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Tadashi Nohara. Kurosawa built his reputation on horror, and he imports that sensibility into the period drama. He shoots in clean high-resolution digital that strips the 1940s of nostalgic grain and leaves the rooms looking bright and exposed. The flatness makes the domestic spaces feel like interrogation chambers. Yusaku’s home-movie footage becomes a recurring device, a reel whose contents can convict or save. Kurosawa stages long dialogue scenes where the threat sits in what goes unsaid.
This is a film about the cost of conscience inside an intimate relationship. Satoko does not choose her husband’s crusade, but his choice becomes hers whether she wants it or not. Kurosawa refuses to let patriotism, marriage, and morality settle into easy alignment. The thriller mechanics work, yet the deeper tension lives in how much a wife can trust the man she has built her life around. The film holds that question to the end and lets it ache.