Night Flower (2025)

A film of risk, parental love, and found family.

Night Flower is a well done film with a couple of flaws, yet to what extent they are truly flaws is up for debate.

The initial quarter of the film is slow, almost in a reluctant way. I was surprised by how much introduction and groundwork was laid before the leads initially met. As a strength, it sets up character depth, motivations, and context, but some may find this time to be a bit too long.

Following this, there is a steady build of tension through the film, highlighted by some fleeting ‘calm before the storm’ moments, although the incoming storm, so to speak, was in some ways anticlimactic and defied expectation. To some again, this may not be an appealing factor. However, I would counter this with the deliberateness of the storytelling, it felt very intentional, serving as a highlight to the proximity to disaster, but not yet completely lost amid the storm.

This film is full of moments of familial warmth, contrasted starkly by the bitter and cruel world of the people around them. Tamae’s new connection with Natsuki and her family becomes that of found family, and while there may be some sapphic undertones, there is no romance in this film as the focus is more on familial love, which was one major question I had had from initially seeing the poster and trailer months ago.

The acting was solid, without any over or under acting issues in key scenes. The soundtrack emphasised classical music fittingly as it is not without its place in the narrative. The narrative was at times unexpected, but in ways that lead to the film feeling deeply rooted in reality in a way that is very much true to Japanese storytelling.

Lastly, one small detail I might mention is that there were two foreign characters with bit parts, and I very much appreciated that they were not treated any differently to anyone else. The one who spoke, didn’t have a foreign accent and wasn’t treated any differently to if she had been Japanese, which I think is a nice detail, considering representation of foreigners like this in Japanese film and drama is not so common.

As for the ending, without any spoilers, I would say it is strange, unexpected, and somewhat sudden. I am very much fine with open endings, but this story left me wanting to see a continuation, yet I equally doubt there are plans for a sequel.

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Beautiful acting, beautiful cinematography, super thought-provoking.

Knew this would be a difficult piece going in but wanted to watch it at the film festival for Kitagawa Keiko (my acting goddess).

Clearly from the synopsis you'd realize the characters have made extremely different life choices than the average person -- but the way the story is set up and the characters play out, you'd believe 100% why they do it and want to root for them. Crazy plotline (in a good way), and the directing was so intentional with the foreshadowing... The camera handled the curveballs and scene transitions with so much grace! High rewatch value is for the foreshadow-digging I like to do with suspenseful movies sometimes - when I recover from the emotional trauma from this one, that is.

The way this movie ended? Spot on. Definitely drew a round of applause when the credits rolled. My husband and I had slightly different interpretations but we both agreed that the fact that these were our conclusions means it was super well done.

PS: bring tissues., I def cried.

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