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Harmonium Reviews
It’s the demons within that Kôji Fukada astutely brings to life in ‘Harmonium.
"Harmonium" is another great piece of Japanese cinema, and the Jury Prize it received from the Un Certain Regard section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, well reserved.
Kôji Fukada... makes us think, too, about remorse and forgiveness, atonement and retribution, and the conclusion he delivers is quietly devastating.
Harmonium is so exquisitely crafted, featuring such quietly magnificent acting, editing, and direction, that it barely sullies the emotional maelstrom Harmonium leaves swirling in its wake.
It's a disturbing, dark, heartbreaking drama with merciless twists that give no easy answers to complex questions of forgiveness and redemption, and how relationships may be based on truth or lies.
The director competently elucidates us about how hard it is, in certain cases, to forgive and forget.
Is there anything more gratifying than a sweepingly downcast story told in a uniquely exhilarating manner?
Tadanobu Asano, who plays the ex-con, has rarely been better, and Kanji Furutachi and Mariko Tsutsui are heartbreaking as the husband and wife.
The spare, humanist influence of Ozu is plain to see here, but Fukada's tone is all his own, simultaneously shot through with violence and compassion.
Harmonium is a borderline-unbearable bummer, but it's also quietly captivating, with evocative framing and excellent performances.
His film may be a bit too obviously constructed as it hurtles towards its ambiguous close, but there is no denying the power and remove with which he realizes it.
It makes for a uniquely churning mix of detective story and recovery drama before it throws another wrenching reveal into the works.
Harmonium wavers between elegantly composed long shots and flights of magic-realistic fancy. It's a tightly controlled storytelling gambit that pays off.
It shocks us long after we walk out of the theater, not with the short-lived scare of a jump cut or grisly image, but with something darker that lives quietly in the unexamined places of the soul.
Fukada never resorts to melodramatics, and instead allows the carefully calibrated performances to give the movie its disquieting power.
If you treat Harmonium like a mood piece, and respond to it on that level, you'll find yourself thinking about it long after you watch it.
This chilly tale of violent secrets and unvoiced misery relies heavily on the skill of actors who seem to know that one false move could tip the whole enterprise into comedy.
By its unforgiving conclusion, Harmonium has plunged headlong into tragedy, but not quite in the way you might imagine.
Just as in the best old-school, Cain-style noir, Fukada's film is eloquent about the fragile privileges of modern urban life and the hidden lies it can be built upon.
Throughout Harmonium, writer-director Kji Fukada works in a rapt and lucid hyper-textural style that suggests a merging of the sensibilities of Alfred Hitchcock and Yasujir Ozu.