Lumière, Edinburgh
Rating ***

Special report: the Edinburgh festival 2001

After Hirokazu Kore-eda's last film, Afterlife - his deeply absorbing and instantly accessible meditation on how we perceive heaven, eternal bliss and the possibility of happiness in this life - western audiences expected a great deal of this director.

  1. Distance
  2. Production year: 2001
  3. Countries: Japan, Rest of the world
  4. Cert (UK): NC
  5. Runtime: 132 mins
  6. Directors: Hirokazu Kore-eda
  7. Cast: Arata, Susumu Terajima, Tadanobu Asano, Yui Natsukawa, Yusuke Iseya
  8. More on this film

Here, perhaps inevitably, he has slightly disappointed them. This is a diffuse film, and lacks Afterlife's clinching motif. It is uncertain in both its tone and its message - if, indeed, any such message exists, or even needs to.

Distance is set six years after a mass suicide by members of a Japanese sect. Various relatives of the victims/perpetrators assemble in the group's woodland cabin hideaway on the banks of a huge lake. They seek...what? Redemption? Insight? Closure?

It is not clear, and things become more mysterious still when a former cult member shows up unexpectedly. As they question him, something of the old group dynamic, the hidden thanatos, begins to re-emerge.

The movie rambles and, in its evocation of a group deathwish, does not have the power or the point of other Japanese movies on the same subject, such as Shinji Aoyama's Eureka or Hiroshi Shimizu's Ikinai. But there is something melancholy and resonant about this film, and it has its own subtle, unsettling effect.

• At the Lumière tonight. Box office: 0131-623 8030.

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