A Pale View of Hills

Kei Ishikawa's 2025 film is adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel. Two timelines run in parallel: a Japanese widow living in England in the eighties, and her youth in postwar Nagasaki in the fifties. The hardest thing about the novel is the unreliability of its narrator, and the film works to preserve it. As the woman tells her daughter about her past some details do not hold; that what is remembered is not what happened emerges slowly. The film does not explain this and leaves it with the viewer. The Nagasaki sections show a few years after the bombing, with the destruction standing in the background as something not discussed. Suzu Hirose and Fumi Nikaido play the women of the two periods. The cinematography uses a different texture for each time. Who it's for: those who like Ishiguro adaptations and drama built on memory. Who it's not for: viewers expecting a clear resolution; the film deliberately preserves the novel's ambiguity.