Yokogao

The quietly unsettling films of Koji Fukada repeatedly return to the theme of the stranger, who intrudes a social order and thus reveals its inner discrepancies. In his new film, the formula is to a certain degree reversed, as Ichiko is an insider: a family’s beloved nurse who doesn’t only care for the sick grandmother, but is also the confidant of the two granddaughters. This harmony is placed under question when the younger Saki suddenly vanishes, only to be found unharmed one week later. At first, there seems no connection between the nurse and the kidnapper. Yet their family relationship will soon turn into a scandal, shattering her reputation when the media finally being reporting on it.
Fukada is less interested in the mechanics of the plot than in the slow-acting poison of mistrust that eventually turns Ichiko into an outsider. Interestingly, the film is not narrated as a downward spiral, but but moves back and forth in time and thereby rather questions the social framing of people, which obliterates ambiguities all too easily. Fukada has constructed a fascinating, often disturbing puzzle of two personalities belonging to the same woman, the afore-mentioned Ichiko and the post-abduction Ichiko, newly named Risa, who will remain passive and indulgent no longer. On the contrary, he will turn her into a sort of avenger of her lost pride. (Dominik Kamalzadeh)