Suzume (2022)

Makoto Shinkai's Suzume concerns a seventeen-year-old girl, a cursed wooden chair, and a supernatural worm that must be locked behind doors in abandoned places across Japan. The film is the third entry in what the director has termed his disaster trilogy, and it carries the weight of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake the way a sommelier carries a decanter: carefully, and with an awareness that the contents will be examined. There are abandoned onsen resorts, a shuttered school, a ferris wheel that no longer turns. The camera lingers on these ruins not to indict anyone but to mourn them. Mourning is not a political program.

Viewers hoping for the familiar apparatus of contemporary social consciousness will leave unsatisfied. The cast is Japanese, the concerns are Japanese, and the film has no interest in auditing its own demographics. The heroine's journey is driven by grief and curiosity, not by an argument about the structures that shaped her. Her aunt Tamaki offers the film's most pointed adult perspective, and even she is permitted to be tired and resentful instead of correct. A roadside bartender, a boy on a moped, a cat of ambiguous moral standing: these are characters, not positions. The chair, for its part, is a chair.

Where the film does lean toward instruction, it does so gently. The closing passages ask us to remember what the earthquake took, and to hold that memory against the slow erosion of time. This is sentiment, not sermon. There are no villains in the economic sense, no lectures on consumption, no manifesto tucked into the third act. It is a road movie about sealing doors, and it stays on the road. We are left with craftsmanship, a swollen runtime, and the quiet conviction that some things should be remembered simply because they happened.