Japanese Film Uses High School Drama Club to Address Unresolved Grief
Shingo Matsumura's 'Between Us' explores how two estranged families cope with a child's disappearance through a school play, debuting at the Tokyo Film Festival.
By Rebecca Foster ·
Two families that shared a close friendship for years are now strangers, separated by the unprocessed trauma of a child's disappearance six years ago. In Shingo Matsumura’s new feature 'Between Us,' the burden of reconciliation falls not on the parents, but on the teenagers who lost their friend. The film uses a high school drama club production as the primary vehicle for these young women to confront the past that their adults refuse to acknowledge.
The narrative begins with a countryside camping trip involving two middle-class households. One group includes ten-year-old Kasumi and her parents. The other family sends eight-year-old Kenji to join them while his older sister Makoto stays home due to illness. Kenji disappears at the campsite, an event that permanently fractures the relationship between the two families. The film skips ahead six years to show the lasting impact of that loss on both households.
Makoto, now a high school student, lives with her mother Emi and a father who has left their home. Her mother works at a library and reacts with visible distress when colleagues ask about her missing son. Kasumi’s family appears more stable on the surface, with her parents still together and a new five-year-old daughter in the home. However, subtle cracks emerge when Kasumi’s mother notes that the youngest child complains about never seeing her father smile.
Matsumura chooses to depict this grief without explicit reenactments of the disappearance. The film relies on the characters' daily behaviors and interactions to convey the weight of the loss. A brief news report heard on a car radio confirms that police have not ruled out foul play in Kenji’s case, a detail that clarifies the stakes for the audience while suggesting a procedural element that the story does not fully pursue.
The central action revolves around Makoto and Kasumi, who attend the same high school and serve as the only members of its drama club. They decide to produce a play that dramatizes their own desire to reconcile. Their mothers, Emi and Fumiko, cross paths at the library, where the presence of Kasumi’s new daughter highlights the growing distance between the two women. The fathers in both families are portrayed as ineffective in processing the event, leaving the emotional labor to the mothers and daughters.
The film premiered in the Nippon Cinema Now section of the Tokyo Film Festival, a category that has become competitive. It is Matsumura’s fourth feature. The review notes that the film is ambitious in its goal to explore meta-textual experimentation but often feels timid in execution. It draws comparisons to the 2019 Korean drama 'Birthday,' which also examined the aftermath of a mass tragedy without showing the event itself.
Performances by the female leads are cited as the strongest element of the film. Ririka Kawashima is described as impressive in the role of Makoto, while Anna Kurasawa, Asami Usuda, and Akiko Kikuchi provide assured work. The film is viewed as a well-assembled piece that offers a platform for these actresses, even if the narrative structure leaves some questions unresolved. Commercial prospects are seen as limited to specialist showcases that focus on emerging cinematic voices.
