GREAT ABSENCE - Mark Reviews Movies

Great Absence, GAGA / Picturehouse

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 18, 2024

The opening scene of Great Absence is almost like something out of a thriller, as armed police quietly approach a house. Without warning, a man opens and steps through the front door, clinging tightly to a briefcase. Co-writer/director Kei Chika-ura immediately establishes a sense of multiple mysteries about the man, the contents of the case, and what might have happened for the police to show up in full force. We receive most of the important answers to these questions by the end of the film, which assembles its puzzle about this man and the important relationships in his life in a way that skillfully undermines its own premise.

In other words, Chika-ura's film may start as a mystery, featuring some sensationalistic elements, including that opening scene, the apparent disappearance of a woman, and the direct suggestion that some kind of violence may have occurred at some point in the recent past. At every turn, though, the screenplay, written by the director and Keita Kumano, confounds those expectations by way of a narrative that almost becomes lost in time, focuses as much on the unsaid as what we see of and hear from these characters, and leads toward a more mundane solution than the film itself intentionally establishes.

In terms of that last part, this is a far more tragic tale than it otherwise might have been, too. It's less about what happened and more about how these characters each become caught up in cycles of attitude and behavior that, under these very specific circumstances, could only have this result.

The man with the briefcase at the start is Yohji (Tatsuya Fuji), and as a consequence of the police action, his 30-something son Takashi (Mirai Moriyama), an actor currently working on a stage production in Tokyo, is called to the town where his father lives to sort out whatever mess—or worse—he has made of things. Quickly, Takashi and his wife Yuki (Yoko Maki), a producer who met him while he was on a TV drama with which she was involved, have some difficult decisions to make.

Yohji has dementia. His mental acuity is diminishing rapidly, and after the incident with the police, it has become clear that Yohji requires around-the-clock care at a residential facility. Some of the questions posed by the facility's administration include any allergies Yohji might have and whether they should take life-support measures if his condition ever requires them. Takashi can't answer these queries, because he simply doesn't know his father or the old man's wishes. After all, Yohji left Takashi and his mother when he was a boy, and the son claims he hasn't seen or spoken to his father in the 30 years since.

This isn't entirely true, as we learn from the assorted flashbacks spread through the central plot, but it's much easier to explain than the complex and emotionally fraught relationship between father and son that's revealed in those scenes from the past. The plot, by the way, has Takashi and Yuki searching for the father's second wife Naomi (Hideko Hara), who was not in the house when the police arrived and whom no one has heard from since.

Yohji either doesn't know or can't remember where his wife is, and even though he only met the woman once, Takashi is worried. He and Yuki find her cellphone amidst the mess that his father's home had become, and for some reason, Yohji explains in gruesome detail an act of violence involving Naomi.

All of this pulls us into the narrative on a distinct level, especially because Yohji can't recall people or events, meaning he might have done something to his wife and completely forgotten about it, and because Takashi himself is such a cypher about the kind of man his father is for reasons that have little to do with this mystery. The flashbacks are key, of course, although it becomes apparent that Chika-ura's attention is dedicated to how these characters generally are and what their specific relationships amount to.

One scene, for example, has Takashi visiting his father and Naomi about 25 years after Yohji left his family. The son has important news for his father, but amidst Yohji's constant criticisms of his son—about his career, his manners, his lack of punctuality, and his absence from the father's life—and noticing how much the husband treats his wife like a servant (He scolds her for not updating the calendar that hangs on the wall), Takashi never has a chance or a desire to tell his father that information. It's only later, when Yohji finally meets his daughter-in-law after she marries his son, that Chika-ura allows us to piece together what that news must have been, and it's most telling that Yohji, after discovering that fact, still treats his son with constant disapproval.

The other central element of the flashbacks is watching Yohji and Naomi's marriage, specifically the juxtaposition of old love letters he wrote to her, as well as her diary entries about their young romance, with Yohji's diminishing mental facilities, which bring the man's harshness and cruelty into the open. Chika-ura seems to building toward a climactic crescendo with this depiction, but again, the story isn't actually about that. Instead, these scenes give us a sense of Naomi, as her past dream of a grand romance becomes a daily nightmare—watching the man she devoted three decades of her life to become more like the man about whom she had been warned.

Great Absence wisely escalates to a feeling of the ordinary, because the answers are simple and plain. What's haunting about Chika-ura's approach, however, is his use of narrative ellipses, as some details are left for us to infer because the characters can't or won't speak of them, and the whole story becoming a circle of painful certainty, as if these characters are forever trapped in a present defined by the past.

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