Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Takeru Satoh, Ryohei Suzuki, Mayu Matsuoka
Intro:
The acting and harrowing psychological detail make for compelling, if not entirely conclusive, dramatic viewing.
Kazuya Shiraishi’s One Night serves as the epitome of every parent’s worst fears. The fear that no matter how hard they try, no matter how good their intentions are, no matter how much they put their children’s wellbeing ahead of their own, that they still somehow failed them. Only here, that idea is taken to its extreme, with the titular Night involving a violently abusive father, a mother (Yuko Tanaka) who stopped him in the most permanent fashion possible, and how that event affected their kids into adulthood.
Revolving around the central trio of Yuji (Takeru Satoh), Daiki (Ryohei Suzuki) and Sonoko (Mayu Matsuoka), Shiraishi’s dive into the effects of abuse and trauma captures not only the intensity of the reaction but quite a few of the varieties in which it can manifest. How it can corrode one’s ability to maintain relationships, how it can warp one’s understanding of what a relationship even is (Sonoko describing someone as a gentleman because he punched her in the stomach, not the face, is a particularly twisted moment), and how it can pervade one’s recollection of the past.
As we get a closer look at the mother, the harassment campaign surrounding her return into town from jail, and her steadfast insistence that what she did was in her children’s best interest… the film proffers an opposing notion: In trying to save them, she might have delivered them into a fate just as bad, if not worse. In between showing the harassment campaign surrounding her return into town, illustrating that these matters are far easier to judge from the outside than in, we see that, in the pull between a parent who wanted the best for their kids and a parent who couldn’t care less, each of the siblings have struggled every step into their current forms.
As much as this film tries to give the subject matter as holistic a perspective as possible, like an even dourer version of Destin Daniel Cretton’s The Glass Castle, it somehow reaches less of a singular conclusion than even that film. It does sufficiently well at showing how scarred everyone has become as a result of abuse, but as for the possibility of healing or how much of that responsibility lies with the victims themselves, there’s a worrying shrug and discordant resolution that cuts into the effectiveness of the whole.
Thankfully, though, not to the point of spoiling the whole. The acting and harrowing psychological detail make for compelling, if not entirely conclusive, dramatic viewing.
