When a film receives colossal praise from all quarters, it comes wrapped in a certain aura, the sort of cumbersome reputation that certain releases at times fail to live up to. Praised at prestigious film festivals, posters triumphantly declare Kokuho (2025), Japan’s highest-grossing live-action film. That’s a mean feat for a rather prodigious national industry (interestingly, the anime-heavy landscape of Japanese cinema results in Kokuho taking only fifth place in Japan’s highest-grossing films generally). English-language critics’ praise includes: “Some of the most thrilling sequences you’d find in the past year of movies” (New York Times); and “…heartfelt and muscular epic” (The Guardian).
Based on the 2018 novel by Shuichi Yoshida (currently only available in Japanese), director Sang-il Lee’s film is centered on the world of Kabuki, a Japanese form of theatre that is not altogether unfamiliar in our globalized world. Detailing the many rises and falls of Kikuo Tachibana (Ryô Yoshizawa), the son of a Yakuza gangster who becomes a renowned onnagata (a man who plays traditionally female roles due to a medieval-era ban on women performing), as the critics point out, Kokuho is obviously an epic masterpiece of sorts.
Let’s try a thought experiment. Take the film’s fundamental skeleton, its ingredients so to speak, remove the Kabuki, and transplant it to a world more familiar to yourself: say football, bharatanatyam, or the family tiling business. For if you take away the Kabuki, the glamorous icing on this otherwise dazzling cake, what are you left with? A narrative without focus, flipping through beat after beat of new direction; soulless characters that are left unexplored; and a rather insipid form that collapses under the weight of all it attempts to include.
Certainly, this makes such critical acclaim for Kokuho all the more perplexing and, moreover, a little frustrating. So what is it about this film that, despite its obvious flaws, is provoking such a sycophantic response?
Kokuho was adapted from an 800-plus-page novel, and, arriving at a four-and-a-half-hour first cut, director Lee Sang-il apparently worked hard to bring it down to a palatable three hours. Nevertheless, whilst three hours is plenty of time to build a meaningful narrative, Lee Sang-il’s film struggles to meaningfully include the constant stream of information it ejects. Could it be that through chasing box office success, which he achieved, perhaps Lee Sang-il did not have the courage to make a really lengthy epic worthy of its source material?.
Of course, in films, length is never the prerequisite for profundity. Take Kokuho’s compatriot, Ryūsuke Hamaguchi‘s 2021 psychological drama Drive My Car, which, in more or less the same runtime, achieves a great deal more. Or the Spanish-language release, Carla Simón’s biographical romance Romeria (2025), distributed in theatres around the same time as Kokuho. In just over two hours, Romeria tightly packs the secrets and tensions of three generations of a family as they delicately branch out. Romeria‘s masterfully constructed scenes culminate n in a climactic showdown at the film’s centre point, which is filled to the brim with content so frenzied that it’s close to bursting.
At first glance, you may find my description of Romeria baffling, for it is a remarkably subtle yet intense assembly of staging, mise-en-scène, and performance. Despite being introduced to many of the family members for the first time, within a mere ten-minute sequence, we feel we know not just know them, but also their underlying idiosyncrasies, histories, and how their lives are intertwined with each other.
The Baffling Gaps in Kokuho‘s Tale of Rivalry
Needless to say, Kokuho is not wanting for material; a great deal – too much really – is covered over the film’s mega runtime. Kikuo is a teenager when his father is murdered. He attempts, with a friend, to take revenge. We are transported to a year later. It turns out the revenge didn’t go as planned, but a famed Kabuki performer, Hanai Hanjiro (played by Ken Watanabe), who watched Kikuo perform the night his father was killed and was dazzled by his talent, offers to take him in and train him, alongside his own equally precocious son, Shunsuke. We are shown their initial training session.
His father’s diverted attentions provoke some jealousy in Shunsuke Ogaki (Ryûsei Yokohama), as we see his resentful expressions in artful close-ups. After this, however, we never again see anything suggesting that there is any competitive spirit between the two, an important dynamic that would later lead to an enormous fallout.
Eight years later, Kikuo and Shunsuke are in their 20s, best friends now, and handsome young men. They rise up in their world as lead performers in their art. That is, until Hanai Hanjiro is injured and cannot perform in an upcoming show of great repute. The obvious choice is that his son, Shunsuke, should replace him. Lo and behold, it is Kikuo that is chosen, albeit for unclear reasons, which appears to be a recurring feature of the film.
In drive and talent, the competitors seem on par with each other, and thus, given nothing from which to interpret this or most of the film’s other occurrences. A strain of utter tedium creeps in as plot point after plot point is superficially introduced, rushed over in haste, before finally losing itself to a quick death or, more often than not, an abandonment, submerged under the lurid glow of the next Kabuki depiction.
Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound (2025) portrays a similar dynamic. The first half of the film details the shared goal of two poverty-stricken, underprivileged best friends to become policemen in an India that wants very little to do with them. One passes the police exam; the other doesn’t, and, of course, from this rise petty jealousies, tensions, and fallings-out. Homebound dedicates its first half to this interaction, yet doesn’t ignore the realities of the characters’ lives, including in its insightful sweep the weight of religious discrimination, their struggle against an inefficient bureaucracy, the pain of caste prejudice, and the ordeal of north Indian village life.
Homebound also conveys the joys of a neighbourhood cricket match, home-cooked biryani, burgeoning young love, and the characters’ tastes in cinema, music, and clothes. In concentrating its focus whilst never ignoring the elements of life that make people what they are, Homebound delivers a realistic depiction of male friendships. It combines depth and rigour in its storytelling, ultimately expressing a truth through which viewers might understand something about themselves, too.
It is not that Kokuho’s theme of the competition between two ambitious friends is substandard – only that it is scarcely explored, buried beneath the frantic weavings in and out of countless other bits of plot, rendering the characters without three-dimensional life. They are templates, copies, left undeveloped at the writing stage, likely in the quest to generate mass appeal.
Case in point: all remnants of Kikuo’s former life – family members, friends, any interests or hobbies – are neglected but for his girlfriend, who makes two minor appearances until she is shown halfway through the film to prefer Shunsuke. No screen time is devoted to exploring this monumental decision she takes to suddenly leave her boyfriend of ten years for his best friend, more or less his adopted brother, of all people. This is a disservice to the character, the storytelling, and the film’s audience.
The story fast-forwards some more years, and Kikuo, hitherto a rather solemn and reserved young man, has become a crass misogynist. He has a geisha mistress and a daughter whom he maintains a neat distance from. In Kokuho‘s most piteous scene, which is cringe and tasteless in equal measure, Kikuo spells out his motivations in life to the audience by telling his daughter that he is praying not to God but to the Devil to secure a deal that would make him the best Kabuki actor of all time. He struggles in his profession over the ensuing years, losing his prestige and standing.
A random young woman who calls him “uncle” appears backstage at one of his shows, so familiar in her calling that we almost feel we’ve missed a trick. Have we seen this character before? No. It’s just the film rushing through yet another plotline. Kikuo seduces and marries the woman, who is the daughter of a corporate sponsor, only to be beaten up by the latter in a brutal showdown that has the makings of a first-class family drama. Finally, Kokuho has us on the edge of our seats. Alas, the story of the corporate sponsor and his daughter disappears as quickly as they entered it.
As in this example, events and character traits are piled on throughout, with no regard for whether they make sense or combine to form a well fleshed-out narrative. Novelist and poet Vladimir Nabokov, in a marvellous 1981 essay for the New York Times on Dostoevsky, writes: “After describing the looks of a character, he (Dostoevsky) uses the old-fashioned device of not referring to his specific physical appearance anymore in the scenes with him.” In the same vein, Kokuho introduces an essential attribute of a character’s life – the murder of a character’s wife, the loss of a girlfriend of ten years to one’s best friend – only to never visit these essential stories again.
Art As Redemption Leaves Unexplored Destruction in Its Wake
Kokuho fast-forwards through numerous years, which see the two friends fight again, make up, find success, one undergoes an amputation, and, after all this, aided by intertitles telling us how much time the storyline jumps in its quest for epic status, we arrive in 2014. Kikuo is now an ageing master of the art, having been conferred the title of “kokuho” (national treasure). He is being interviewed on the occasion by none other than the daughter he abandoned decades ago.
As tears fill his eyes, she tells him that despite all that happened, she couldn’t help but be utterly moved by his performances. Even though he’s a bastard, she says, it was his craft that guided him. This is a puerile scene that expresses the notion that all is forgiven in the quest for Art, and that the victim herself would wholeheartedly deliver this exoneration on a plate to her perpetrator.
The idea that art functions as a sort of redemption for the one who creates it, that it almost, not excuses or justifies, but explains away bad behaviour, is a contentious one that, in an era of revelation after revelation of the numerous depravities of the rich and powerful and famous, is oft talked about. The TV series Mad Men (2007-15) toys with this idea.
We first meet its advertising exec, Don Draper (John Hamm), when he is at the top of his game, having created an era-defining advert for Lucky Strike cigarettes. Four years and four seasons later, he does something similar for a floor-wax business. Then he coasts through the next seven years indulging in alcoholism, adultery, and other destructive behaviours, before the show ends with his creation of the iconic 1971 Coca-Cola “Hilltop” ad in the series finalé.
One of the beauties of the defining scene in this episode, “Person to Person”, is the suggestion that, despite everything that has gone before, Don is still capable of creating a truly great advert, and in the process, somewhat atones for his sins. The ending scene of Mad Men is left open to interpretation, so open that it is still debated by fans.
The problem we see with Kokuho is that the constructed scene intended to convey a similar idea clings so tightly to that idea that its delivery is rigid, leaving no space for the viewer to arrive at their own conclusion. That Kikuo has been blinded by his quest for Kabuki supremacy, and through his achievements, his immoralities are redeemed, is conveyed via a remarkably bland yet unsubtle dialogue between father and daughter, through rising tones of clumsy soundtrack, and through tears in the eyes of our noble hero that fail to induce emotion in viewers apart from an acquiescent surrender to the film’s heavy-handedness.
The Kabuki displayed on screen, with its striking make-up, gorgeous lighting, and Falsetto singing, is sublime. The camera finds the perfect angle from which to subsume viewers within the performances’ alluring flow. Yet it is not just Kikuo that is blinded by Kabuki. It is the audience, too, who Kabuki blinds, rather like a gorgeous ray of sun overexposing a shot that was poorly composed anyway.
Alas, we are overwhelmed not just by the stunning art form; we feel an ardent yet delusory admiration arise in us. Enamoured by the spectacle, we may accept whatever else occurs in Kokuho‘s mammoth three hours as equally magisterial. However, shorn of the admiring incomprehension provoked by the splendour of the image, the observing eye sees past the illusion of the film’s performance to the rickety set that upholds it. We suspect Yoshida’s novel is better constructed.