Review | Phases of the Moon movie review: Japanese reincarnation drama is an unabashedly romantic tear-jerker
- Starring Yo Oizumi, Kasumi Arimura and Ko Shibasaki, Phases of the Moon suggests reincarnation occurs every day and might affect everyone who has ever lived
- Director Ryuichi Hiroki steers well clear of any scientific or theological justification, instead focusing on the message that ‘love conquers all’
3/5 stars
Phases of the Moon, the new film from director Ryuichi Hiroki, posits that reincarnation is absolutely real. Not only that, but it is ubiquitous.
The film does not appear to have any specific religious inclinations, but nevertheless suggests reincarnation occurs every single day and might very well affect everyone who has ever lived.
Just as the moon itself waxes and wanes each month, dying and being reborn anew, in Phases of the Moon, so too does the human consciousness return inside a new host once a person has shuffled off their mortal coil.
Needless to say, this is a concept that ordinary businessman Kei Osanai (Yo Oizumi) struggles to accept, even as the evidence steadily mounts in its favour.
Kei’s life is thrown through a loop when his wife, Kozue (Ko Shibasaki), and teenage daughter, Ruri (Kikuchi Hinako), are killed in a car accident.
Almost a decade later, he is approached by Ruri’s best friend from high school, Yui (Ito Sairi), who is now the mother to her own eight-year-old girl. Yui reveals to Kei a secret that Ruri shared with her many years earlier, that she believed she was not all that she appeared to be, or more accurately, who she appeared to be.
The story jumps back a few decades – specifically to December 8, 1980, the day John Lennon was murdered – as it charts Kei’s marriage to Kozue, his former college classmate, and the subsequent birth of their daughter.
Simultaneously, the film also tracks a seemingly unrelated romance between record store worker Akihiko (Ren Meguro) and an aloof young beauty named Ruri (Kasumi Arimura).
From here the film slowly uncoils a meticulously constructed narrative, as different experiences from different decades seem to echo one another in ways only a few certain individuals would ever notice.
The more Kei is able to piece together – from his own memory, Yui’s revelations, and the portrait of a mysterious young man his daughter painted – the more logic and rational explanations seem unable to fully explain what has happened.
The narrative possibilities of such a premise, in which the reincarnated retain all of their memories from their previous lives and are compelled to act upon them, might have been better suited to a more spectacular and sensationalist setting.
Nevertheless, Hiroki’s choices prove equally valid, directing with an engaging lucidity that steers well clear of any scientific or theological justification. If his “love conquers all” explanation is ultimately a little quaint, it very much fits the tone of this unabashedly romantic tear-jerker.
