Can one forgive a past obscured by years? And what remains when someone drifts beyond recognition? These aren’t just questions posed in Great Absence—they’re the very terrain it traverses, quietly and insistently, over the course of two long, deliberate hours. In Kei Chikaura‘s sophomore feature, answers never quite arrive. Instead, what remains is the weight of every glance, the hollow spaces and every silence shared between father and son. Through these moments and spaces, we sit with the unresolved: the ghostly outlines of memory and the ache of time slipping just out of reach.
The film opens with a sequence that feels like misdirection: a tense police officer approaches a house, setting audiences up for a crime thriller. But the figure who emerges isn’t a suspect; it’s an elderly man, bewildered and dissociative, more lost than dangerous. He’s Yohji (Tatsuya Fuji), a once-respected academic who now lives alone and in confusion, his mind deteriorating rapidly. We see him wandering through his own house like it’s no longer his. He has forgotten how to operate the stove, the fridge, even the phone—basic anchors of domestic life suddenly inaccessible.
When his son Takashi (Mirai Moriyama), a working actor in Tokyo, gets the call from the police, he and his wife Yuki (Yôko Maki) arrive at the scene and begin piecing together what’s happened. Yohji’s home is a disordered maze of forgotten objects, cluttered notes, and post-its—signposts meant to keep the old man tethered to a life that’s slipping fast from memory. More importantly, Takashi returns to a father he hasn’t spoken to in two decades.
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From here, Great Absence shifts between past and present. The non-linear structure—so common in contemporary cinema—offers more than a stylistic device. It mirrors both Yohji’s cognitive disarray and the emotional distance between father and son. Leaving Takashi’s mother decades ago for a woman named Naomi (Hideko Hara), Naomi often can’t be found, leaving Yohji to his own devices, her absence hanging over the film like a ghost.
As he prolongs his stay to take care of his father, Takashi finds Naomi’s journal stuffed with old love letters from Yohji, unlocking a life of unspoken tenderness neither of them ever shared, and now both face losing. Delusion, or perhaps denial, constantly reshapes Yohji’s version of the past, while Takashi, reluctant and weary, finds himself caught in limbo between confronting this fractured man and honouring the fragile remnants of connection left behind. The story that unfolds becomes less about Takashi helping his father locate Naomi, and more about confronting the emotional wreckage left behind when memory begins to erode.
Chikaura approaches the film with surgical restraint. He has no interest in hand-holding the audience through emotional peaks or plot turns. Quite the contrary, he leans hard into ambiguity—into the unsaid, the ellipsis. In one early scene, Takashi rehearses lines from a play: “I’ll remember it all, though I won’t recall it.” A little on the nose? Maybe. But it announces the film’s thematic preoccupation with the slipperiness of memory. From that moment on, the film shifts constantly between timeframes, recollections, and states of mind. The past isn’t reconstructed so much as it flickers in and out, like an old bulb struggling to stay lit.
Shot on 35mm by Yutaka Yamazaki, whose collaborations include work with early-era Kore-eda, the film has a tactile, unvarnished feel. It doesn’t strive for aesthetic perfection. Instead, it moves like a half-remembered dream, with grainy textures and natural light capturing the fraying edge of reality. Each frame holds onto something; if not a memory, then the sense of something lost.
Tatsuya Fuji’s performance as Yohji serves as the film’s center of gravity. He doesn’t lean into the theatrical tics often associated with portrayals of dementia; rather, he plays Yohji as a man slowly evaporating—still capable of flashes of wit or cruelty, but increasingly unreachable. What makes the performance so affecting is its unpredictability: the way he slips from lucidity into vacancy in a matter of seconds, or the way a moment of recognition catches in his eyes only to vanish just as quickly. It’s a role that could’ve been turned into pathos or villainy. Fuji chooses neither.
Mirai Moriyama matches him note for note. As Takashi, he doesn’t chase redemption or revenge. He’s too tired for either. What he gives us is something harder to portray onscreen: emotional paralysis. He looks at his father and sees both a man who failed him and a man who no longer remembers doing so. In one particular scene, Yohji brings himself to apologise to Takashi for the pain he’s caused his son, then tells—more a command than entreaty—the latter, “Say you’ll forgive me.” For the young man, there’s no catharsis in that; only the painful work of coming to terms with what’s no longer retrievable.
Yôko Maki and Hideko Hara turn in quietly solid supporting performances, but Great Absence keeps its focus narrow. Most of the film unfolds in private, uncomfortable moments between father and son. Chikaura isn’t aiming for reconciliation. There’s no climactic third-act scene, no triumphant montage of healing. The film offers no clear answers about Yohji’s missing wife Naomi either, and that omission isn’t a narrative gap—it’s a statement. The absence itself becomes the point. Life contains mysteries we’ll never know, and people we’ll never truly understand, even when they’re sitting right in front of us.
What resonated with me most was the film’s understanding of memory as a fragile tether between people. When that tether snaps, we’re left floating—not just without our loved ones, but without a sense of where we came from. In that regard, Great Absence reminds me of another film I saw earlier this year, Pavel G. Vesnakov’s Windless. But where Windless focuses on a son coming back home after his father’s death and reconciling his idea of his father with the good things the townsfolk are saying, Great Absence places that reckoning uncomfortably in the present. The film forces Takashi to confront the idea of who his father was while Yohji is still physically present—an arguably more painful ordeal.
It also brought to mind Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, in how both films use acting as a prism through which grief, resentment, and self-deception refract. Takashi, like Yusuke, rehearses lines he can’t yet speak from the heart, clinging to the safety of performance to navigate emotional terrain too treacherous to cross unaided. Yet where Drive My Car deals with an emotionally absent wife, Great Absence presents the far starker challenge of being next to someone whose vacancy unfolds in real time, inch by inch, moment by moment.
As the film meanders through its two-hour runtime (which, it must be said, flirts dangerously with indulgence), even viewers with a taste for slow cinema may find their patience tested. Due in part to its non-linear structure, the film contains stretches where the narrative momentum thins out, where the silences feel less loaded and more slack. But to Chikaura’s credit, he never betrays the tone he’s committed to. He holds the line between subtlety and stasis, and while the film may risk alienating some viewers, it rewards those willing to stay with it.
In the end, Great Absence leaves audiences with little in the way of resolution. For all its disorientation, the film is piercingly lucid about what it means to lose someone before they leave this world. But perhaps that’s the most honest thing it could do. Sometimes, the best we can offer another person is presence—even when our understanding of them falters, even when the past remains unreconciled. Just being there, in the shadow of absence, is an act of grace.
