Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl (2019)

Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl arrives as a theatrical sequel to a television series about a young man whose romantic life is complicated by a condition called puberty syndrome, which manifests as supernatural phenomena. This is, we are told, the grand climax. The plot involves two versions of the same girl, a heart transplant, a fatal traffic accident, and a willingness to rewrite causality itself so that love might persist. It is earnest, it is convoluted, and it moves at the pace of a student cramming for exams.

For the purposes of classification, the film presents remarkably little to catalogue. The cast is homogeneously Japanese, and no effort is made to assemble it along contemporary representational lines. Female characters carry real emotional weight, Mai and the two Shokos among them, yet the story has no interest in critiquing the structures that surround them. Race, class, climate, body image: these subjects never surface. The supernatural affliction at the center is played for pathos, not as an allegory for neurodivergence, and the time travel serves romance and grief exclusively. No alternate history is being corrected here.

What remains is a melodrama that wants badly to make you cry, and by most accounts succeeds. It is a film about sacrifice told with a straight face and an abundance of tears, and it asks nothing of the audience beyond feeling. The sermon is absent. The lecture never arrives. There is only a boy, a girl, and a car that keeps hitting the wrong person. We record the results without complaint, and we move on to the next screening.