KODAI KUROSAKI IN BRAND NEW LANDSCAPE

YUIGA DANZUKA: BRAND NEW LANDSCAPE (2025) - NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2026

Urban anomie enacted in family collapse

A blurb for this film says, "In bustling Tokyo, Ren delivers delicate orchids across the city, carrying the weight of his mother's absence and years of silence between him and his father, until one delivery changes everything." This is a delicate film, bursting with urban anomie and the suffering caused when family bonds have frayed early on. With its slow burns and handsome urban cinematography this is a striking debut film.

Perhaps not such a new landscape, since family dysfunction is the oldest of subjects, but a precocious work, since the director was reportedly only twenty-six. The cause of the dysfunction is the ambition of the husband and father, who goes overseas (Singapore) for work and never returns, or when he finally does return, the daughter reports to her brother, she has forgotten what his voice sounds like: he has become a stranger. Or perhaps he always was one. What is new here are the parallels between family and city, suggestions and contrasts that veteran Japan Times critic Mark Schilling says "add suggestive metaphorical layers." Schilling notes this film is set in "the more futuristic parts of Tokyo — Shibuya rather than Asakusa," and eschews "Neon jungle" clichés, where the new city can be alienating, but also a place of shimmering beauty.

Focus is on the son, and there are evidently autobiographical elements. While the father is the designer of urban complexes, the director's was a landscaper. The image of the complexes is a powerful one, a metaphor almost for megalomania, the intoxication of control, manipulating lives, a role that mere fatherhood pales with by comparison. The mother Yumiko (Haruka Igawa) dies early on by suicide, at least partly due to her husband's abandonment for career.

It begins with two children (12 and 18), mother, and father just arrived at a very nice beachside summer house. This soon ends when the father, an ambitious architect, gets a phone call, he's getting a big important job, he must leave, and the togetherness and the vacation are over. When the action resumes, ten years later, the mother is long gone, the father is long estranged, the son is working delivering orchids, and his sister is considering marriage.

There is a recurrent image provided through an in-car TV comedy show of a light that always breaks and falls shattering on the ground, as if to suggest life goes perpetually wrong. There is a calculated unease here.

There is some estrangement even, in a way, between sister Emi (Mai Kiryû) and brother Ren (Kodai Kurosaki) because Yumiko refuses to acknowledge caring about the father's abandonment, while it deeply troubles and angers Ren, who craves an apology.

Eventually son Ren, the younger sibling, goes to his father's ("Hajime's" - veteran actor and director Kenichi Endō) headquarters in the city in the course of his job delivering huge orchid plant arrangements. Hajime knows who it is, but lacks understanding of what is needed. His offering of money only angers the young man, who throws the orchids at his father. He has to deliver them again, but is fired. There is a comical outburst when his supervisor screams "You're fired" and Ren says that looks silly. This virtuoso single-take sequence, showing the whole factory-like workplace and ending with a young female employee (Misaki Hattori) declaring that she quits, is one of those demonstrations that Japanese repression has its costs because when it fails it fails big.

In the present time, we learn Hajime has decided to take on a big, soulless project, and the staff are upset. He says yes, it's a chore, but he had to take it on to pay the bills, to pay them. Hajime's human failure with his family is being reenacted with his professional "family." In hisIndieWire review Josh Slater-Williams suggests there is an implied parallel to the question whether a fractured family can be restored (evidently not) of whether the damage caused by restructuring a city (disgruntled staff; displaced homeless people) may not be worse than its positive aspects. But the film is dedicated by Danzuka to the city (Tokyo) and his mother...

The last part of the film is taken up with Ren's attempt to stage a confrontation of his sister and himself with his father. In surreal or magic realist sequences, their mother reappears. The three sit down in the restaurant where the four last sat. The estranged Yumiko won't eat but talks, but Ren can only noisily eat and can't talk. In her ghostly magic realist scenes, the sweet, distant Yumiko needs neither eat nor talk, but provides reassurance and consolation. The structure of Danzuka's film is complex, but neat. There is a balance between cool urban imagery and intense emotional scenes. The film shows a lot of thought, but is tactile and cinematic. The sought resolution arrives for Ren after all when he comes across his father helplessly weeping after a visit from the thost of his wife. Ren squats down to watch the weeping from a short distance, laughing, all smiles. But neither the siblings nor the father will stop regretting the past.

Brand New Landscape 見はらし世代 (Miwarashi sedai "The View Generation"), 115 mins., premiered at Cannes Directors Fortnight May 15, 2025, showing also at Shanghai, Melbourne, Haifa, São Paulo, Chicago, and, it was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (April 8–19, 2026). ND/NF showtimes:
Wednesday, April 15
6:00pmat MoMA, Titus Theater 2 – Q&A with Yuiga Danzuka
Thursday, April 16
8:45pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater – Q&A with Yuiga Danzuka

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.