Look Back

The prolific Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda is back with his second feature of the year. After the disappointing Sheep in the Box premiered in Cannes, he has arrived on the Venetian Lido with something altogether more affecting, and his best film since Shoplifters.

A live-action adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s beloved manga, previously brought to the screen as an anime in 2024, Look Back is, above all, a film about drawing, friendship and the strange ways art can bind two lives together. It is also extraordinarily sweet.

Fujino is a young girl celebrated by her classmates for the manga strips she publishes in the school newspaper. Then another artist appears, and her strips steal the Fujino’s spotlight. They belong to the mysterious Kyomoto, an intensely introverted homeschooled classmate who has never been seen in class. Suddenly, Fujino has a rival.

When the two finally meet, Fujino discovers that Kyomoto is not a threat at all. Quite the opposite: she is shy, awkward and utterly in awe of Fujino’s work. The rivalry instantly gives way to friendship, and the two begin drawing together, eventually creating successful manga while growing up side by side and becoming co-dependent.

There is something deeply affectionate in the way Kore-eda approaches the Japanese manga tradition. Look Back carries a genuine reverence for the craft, carefully accounting for the hours spent drawing, the magic of a collaborative creation, and the excitement of seeing the work finally published. For a while, the film is pure happiness. And, naturally, this being Kore-eda, you should never get too comfortable.

The sweeter the film becomes, the more painful its eventual turn. As the girls grow older, their paths begin to diverge. Despite the success of their work together, one of them wants to pursue a different direction as an artist, threatening the collaboration that has defined so much of their life and friendship. And when the tragedy inevitably strikes, Kore-eda uses the rapture to do something quietly devastating. Rather than simply showing us what happens to the two girls, he begins to explore the lives they might have lived had they never met, parallel possibilities branching away from a single friendship and a single moment in time.

It is a beautiful meditation on the invisible influence people have on one another. How one friendship can alter the course of an entire life. How much of who we become depends on the people we happen to encounter, especially when we are young.

And Kore-eda, whose greatest weapon is not plot but observation, is once again extraordinary with children. The tiny gestures through which affection gradually becomes trust feel so natural that Look Back often seems to unfold like a memory. There is a preciousness to childhood here, but never a sentimental one. Kore-eda understands that children can experience friendship with an intensity adults often lose, that finding someone who shares your obsession can feel like discovering an entirely new universe. And when that universe fractures, everything collapses.

The film’s title takes on greater meaning as it unfolds. To look back is not simply to remember childhood, but to consider all the lives that might have existed alongside the one we actually lived. Kore-eda turns nostalgia into something more complicated, simultaneously an act of mourning, imagination and gratitude.

With Look Back, Kore-eda has made something tender, authentic and gently moving, and one of the favourites of the 83rd Venice Film Festival.