Those who enjoy Japanese cinema and roam film festivals will surely have had the chance to see one of Mayu Nakamura’s feature films, The Summer of Stickleback (2006), Intimate Stranger (2022) and She Is Me, I Am Her (2022). For those who are not quite sure whether Nakamura’s narratives are worth their time can find out by giving her latest short, Hail Mary, a watch. In just ten minutes, those spectators will get a good idea what Nakamura is all about.  

A Filipino women named Maria (Stefanie Arianne) wanders the streets of Tokyo with a mysterious package wrapped in towels. The night is cold and long and people with good and bad intentions walk around.

In the short span of ten minutes, Nakamura shows the reparative effects of a fleeting encounter as well as the destructive impact the object of money has on social fabric. She touches upon the pain of a mother who knows she is stuck within a situation that prescribes her failure as well as the pain of a father who, in all probability due to his injury, got divorced and lost contact with his child.

In Hail Mary, Nakamura focuses on those people who escape the societal gaze, who try to survive on the fringes of Japanese society and whose tragedy is misrecognized. Behind the beauty of Japanese traditionality and hospitality, behind the joys of modernity littered around Tokyo lies a world of tragedy, a never-ending accumulation of subjective trajectories defined by pain, sadness, a fleeting whiff of hope, and, if things go from bad to worse, a brutal infraction of criminal enjoyment.  

Hail Mary has a documenting quality, due to Nakamura’s use of shaky dynamism. Yet, as the final of her short proves, she is not afraid to utilize visual decorations and auditive manipulations to heighten the impact of her narrative.

Even though the visual fabric is characterized by a naturalistic colour-and lighting design, Nakamura does emphasize the darkness that characterize the night. The visual emphasis on shadows does not only help her in creating pleasant contrasts, but also allows Nakamura to visualize the emotional tone of her short-narrative. The dark depressed quality of the night often attains a suffocating quality, threatening to swallow Maria in the void of death. The day-sequences, for that matter, are defined with the depressed heaviness of the overcast sky.  

With Hail Mary, Nakamuradelivers a simple narrative with an emotional gut punch. While there is much more to tell about the characters – many things are merely touched upon, Nakamura still succeeds in making the spectator care for Maria and impact him/her emotionally with her tragedy.