Tremble All You Want

Akiko Ohku's 2017 Japanese film follows Yoshika, twenty-four, who has been in love with the same boy since middle school. That fixation has prevented her from considering anyone else, and when a colleague at work asks her out the balance breaks. Yoshika refers to the two men by numbers: one and two. The structure deliberately mixes the interior voice in Yoshika's head with reality, and what surfaces in the second half is that part of what the viewer has seen exists only in her mind. Mayu Matsuoka's performance carries that transition. The film shows loneliness not as a romantic deficiency but as a system a person builds for herself. Who it's for: viewers who like Japanese independent romantic comedy and unreliable narrator structures. Who it's not for: anyone wanting a straightforward romance, or who will find the protagonist talking to herself wearing.