Review: The Backwater

Set in rural Japan in 1988, the film concerns a teenager named Toma (Masaki Suda), whose father (Ken Mitsuishi) is a physically and sexually abusive to his current girlfriend Kotoko (Yukiko Shinohara), and presumably Toma’s divorced mother Jinko (Yuko Tanaka) many years ago. Although he occasionally beds down with Kotoko himself, Toma has a girlfriend too (played by Misaki Kinoshita), and he is worried that his sadistic father’s influence will see him turn into a similarly monstrous bastard of a man towards her (Cheating apparently isn’t a concern, though). Meanwhile, Toma makes occasional visits to see his mother, who cleans and processes fish caught in the polluted local river.

Although relatively well-acted across the board and featuring nice backwater Japanese locales, this 2013 film from director Shinji Aoyama and writer Haruhiko Arai is endlessly unpleasant to no real point and not a whole lot of merit. Hell, even the sex is boring and one-dimensional.

Set in the late 80s and based on a popular novel, it’s just too thin, so that things play out too quickly, leaving the film nowhere to go and a lot of time to do so. Everyone here acts in slow-motion, it takes forever for anyone to take a stand. I know that happens in real life too, but in a film it becomes frustrating and off-putting very quickly. It’s 15 minutes of nothingness preceded by 70-80 minutes of ‘Is that all there is?’. Since it’s all so unpleasant and monotonous, there’s nothing much to keep you terribly interested.

I understand the film, I just don’t get the point as such, and it’s too unpleasant to care. I can’t see why anyone would willingly want to watch this. It’s little ado about even less, and ugly all-round. Well-shot, though, by cinematographer Takahiro Imai.

Rating: C