Director – Ryo Ushimaru – 2023 – Japan – 96m
*****
A bizarre drama plays out among a group of people running a chicken farm – plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2025 which runs from Friday, 7th February to Monday, 31st March
Wheelchair-bound Satomi (Maya Kudamatsu) likes to hunt. So sister-in-law Yuko (Kokone Sasaki) takes her out game shooting. Yuko is a people pleaser: she likes to help. Disability nothwithstanding, Satomi is the type that likes to order people around. She has Yuko wrapped around her little finger to the extent that she can get Yuko to phone the air con repair man on his annual leave, insist he come and fix the system while he’s on holiday and even absolve Satomi of any involvement during the phone call. Yuko is, to say the least, compliant, while Satomi is a bully.
Yuko’s small holding, battery chicken farmer husband Ryosuke (Kenta Kiguchi) delivers freshly laid eggs to the egg station every morning, where he pretends not to know his mistress Saki (Ruka Ishikawa), instead confining their relationship to a hidden away hotel room later in the day. Here, she shows him her positive pregnancy test. What’s Ryo going to do about it? He makes excuses.
So then, Saki turns up at the farm where the hapless Yuko believes Saki to be looking for work, and interviews her. Ryo is shocked to come home to find his pregnant mistress in his home, and further shocked still when she reveals to the other two women that she is having his baby. Slowly, she starts to worm her way into the farm’s way of life, usurping Yuko’s position as cook, housewife and carer by making herself indispensable in these roles.
With his infidelity and resultant fatherhood out in the open, Ryo seems scarcely more together than his wife. The person who makes all the decisions on the farm is the walking stick wielding Satomi, while Yuko engages in discusses with farmhand Taichi (Chikara To) as to whether chickens have feelings.
Although much of this takes place in a small farmhouse and the surrounding premises, it works so well as a movie that you’d never know it was based on a stage play. The mixture of very different characters provides a heady cocktail indeed for the viewer as the narrative hurtles towards its logical if thoroughly unexpected conclusion. Using deceptively simple resources, the drama lurches through numerous twists and turns before it eventually gets to where it’s heading.
If this is intended as some sort of group portrait of the Japanese psyche, it’s pretty terrifying. Yet a mixture of clever plotting, wildly contrasting performances and the ubiquitous backdrop of battery hen farming deliver a unique and thoroughly rewarding, viewing experience.
Qualia plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2025 which runs from Friday, 7th February to Monday, 31st March. #JFTFP25
This year’s programme has the overall theme:
Am I Right?
Justice, Justification and Judgement in Japanese Cinema.
Trailer (Japanese only, no subs):