“Humanity has only seen a small part of the world.”
It is not the first time that director Nobuhiro Doi and screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto (known from Hirokazu Koreeda’s Monster (2023)) work together. In 2021, they delivered a somewhat unconventional romance narrative with We Made a Beautiful Bouquet. Their latest collaboration starts from an interesting premise – the subjective experience of ghosts who wander in the ‘unreachable’ world of living, yet does the elaboration of this premise result in an engaging and satisfying filmic experience?
The narrative of Unreachable starts when Misaki Sagara (-), having just finished her musical script, discovers that Tenma Sugisaki (-), the boy practising the piano behind her in the choir room, has disappeared – seemingly evaporated in thin air. She looks for him in the corridors, yet only encounters a dark-cladded man. Yuka (-), having just entered the room for choir-practice, cannot contact her mother – she does not answer her phone.
Many years later, Misaki (Suzu Hirose), who has been living together with Sakura Azumi (Kaya Kiyohara) and Yuka Kataishi (Hana Sugisaki) in a big old house, has seemingly forgotten all about the strange event. Yet, one day, she is reminded of the past when she, forced by Sakura to follow the handsome guy she’s interested, hears a woman call him Tenma. On the other hand, Yuka, while walking on the university campus, catches a glance of a woman staring at her – she mumbles ‘mother’.
Unreachable offers audiences a supernatural drama that explores the subjective effect of being merely a spectator to the relational happenings within the greater societal field, of being present within the societal field as radical absence – no voice, not physical presence, of having to deal with the knowledge that, despite being able to see and hear the breathing societal field, one cannot participate within it. Or to put it differently, Doi delivers a drama of the impossibility of partaking in societal events and the relationships that structure the living subject.
One could even qualify Doi’s Unreachable as a supernatural slice-of-life narrative. Rather than unfolding an intricate plot, the director focuses on presenting the spectator a concatenation of cozy mundane moments – the time our three women spend together – and occurrences that sketch out the emotional impact of being absent in the physical world they do keep wandering in.
Doi also interweaves some flashbacks within the unfolding of the narrative. These flashback-fragments do not merely visualize what happened to Misaki, Yuka, and Sakura in the past, but are try to explain the strength of their bond and the dynamic of their interactions. Doi’s slice of life focuses, in other words, on exploring relational dynamics in a heartwarming and touching manner – a supernatural Umimachi diary (2015), if you will.
However, as the narrative unfolds, Doi suddenly introduces one main narrative thread, the narrative backbone. Yuka’s speculative theory concerning their existence within the physical world in which they manifest themselves as absent – the presence of sub-atomic particles and slightly out-of-sync layers. This theory and the subsequent attempt to test it out – Can we be detected by an experimental device? And can we possibly return to the layer of the living? – sets a whole concatenation of events and revelations in motion.
The event of Yuka’s theory, the backbone for the narrative of Unreachable, comes to orient the unfolding of three minor narrative threads. The first thread concerns the events and revelations caused by Misaki following her unrequited love within the societal field. This thread touches upon the subjective impact of the inability of working-through guilt and the struggle to overcome its inhibiting effects.
The second minor thread concerns the way Sakura comes to deal with the discovery that the perpetrator of the choir-club murder case has been released and will release his memoirs. And the third thread concerns Yuka’s attempt to reconnect with or, to put it better, reach her mother, who works at a nearby flower shop.
All three narrative threads eventually touch upon the same thematical thought – the truth screenwriter Sakamoto aims to stage: the unreachable state of loved ones due to the passage of time. The film shows, in a fantastical manner, that, as time passes, loved ones have, to a certain extent, worked-through grief – allowed themselves to accept a radical absence – and have allowed themselves to make new libidinal investments. Yet, Doi does not forget to emotionally reiterate that certain traumatic events, despite being worked through or given a symbolic inscription, cling to the subject and define his present and his future.
The composition of Unreachable is quite straightforward – a pleasant flow of dynamic and static shots. Nobuhiro Doi, however, did effort to create, via his composition, space and time for the three main actresses to charm the spectator with their presence and the way they breathe life into their ‘sisterly’ interactions. These moments do not merely provide moments of cozy ‘fan-service’ – fans of the actresses won’t be disappointed, but also seeks to establish a minimum quantum of emotionality to fuel a myriad of dramatic and unexpected moments.
Sadly, such quantum of emotionality – the emotional hook that makes the spectator invest in the narrative – does not realize itself. The moments of fan-service do not result in a genuine emotional frame that enhances the impact of the performances and successfully supports the dramatic turns the narrative takes in the second half of the film. While Doi succeeds in delivering some effective dramatic moments, many dramatic moments become overly melo-dramatic. Faced with these moments of melo-drama, the spectator also comes to realize that certain twists and coincidences are merely ‘forced’ narrative tricks to manipulate and elicit his emotions.
Doi, moreover, often lets the interactional pace – the rhythm of the exchanging of signifiers, determine the pace of his composition. While such editing seeks to put the spectator into the turmoil of verbalized signifiers, the swift concatenation of shots sorts a disorienting effect on the spectator, diminishing his ability to feel the way the signifier, as it circles between the three women, affects them.
Unreachable proves that an interesting premise does not always result in a satisfying and wholesome filmic experience. While the film delivers many touching moments and some genuine moments of drama – Suzu Hirose, Hana Sugisaki, and Kaya Kiyohara are a joy to watch, the inability of Nobuhiro Doi and Yuji Sakamoto, the screenwriter, to establish a firm emotional frame for the spectator to libidinally invest in ultimately allows him to consciously perceive how the narrative tries to manipulate his emotions – the melodrama does not merely fall flat, but also leaves a sour aftertaste in the spectator’s mouth.
