The Last 10 Years

Matsuri, twenty years old, is told that an incurable illness leaves her roughly ten years to live. She decides to keep everyone at a distance, and then meets Kazuto at a school reunion. The film is not interested in death. It is interested in duration: the structure is tied to a calendar, the chapters move forward year by year, and the time two people can give each other shrinks a little with every one. The form is calm and unadorned. The illness scenes are not mined for melodrama, and the workings of the hospital are shown with something close to documentary indifference. The source is Kosaka Ruka's 2007 novel, and the novel came out of the author's own life: Kosaka was ill in the same way and died in 2017. The shortness of time on screen is not a fictional device but the writer's own arithmetic. Michihito Fujii directed; Nana Komatsu and Kentaro Sakaguchi star. It opened in Japan on 4 March 2022. Who it is for: viewers who love Japanese illness melodrama and films that use a shrinking clock as a structure. Who it is not for: anyone who resists the genre's emotional pressure. The film announces its ending in the first minute and spends the next two hours under its weight.