Restless

Restless (2011) is one of Gus Van Sant's quietest films, built around two teenagers and a ghost. Enoch lost his parents in an accident and has taken to attending the funerals of people he never knew. At one of them he meets Annabel. She has cancer and the doctors have given her three months. Enoch's only friend is the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot from the Second World War, named Hiroshi, visible to nobody but him. That setup could easily have been ridiculous. It is not, because Van Sant refuses to use death as dramatic material. Hiroshi does not sit there as a metaphor, he is simply present. The two of them play chess and talk. The best thing in the film is that Annabel behaves less like someone playing an ill person and more like someone genuinely curious about dying. This was Henry Hopper's first lead. He is Dennis Hopper's son, and his father died during the production. It opened Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2011 to a divided reception. It runs 91 minutes. Good for: quiet coming of age drama, films about death, and Van Sant. Less good for: illness and grief are the direct subject, and the people who find it over aestheticised have a point.