Watches
October 29, 2023
An older TV movie from Obayashi. It's obvious the budget nor the time was there to make a full-fledged Obayashi experience, but he did a pretty decent job considering these limitations. It's never going to be one of his all-time classics, but fans of the director will no doubt find something to appreciate here.
An aged, reclusive movie star is thought to be dead. But wants to find her way back into the spotlight. She entices a movie producer to hire a writer and send him to the island she lives on to work on her comeback movie. As the two spend some time together, it quickly dawns on the writer that nothing is what it seems.
It's an ambitious film, which many parallels to draw to other films and genres, but in the end its TV roots keep it from achieving anything too out of the ordinary. The meta element is fun, there are some funky visual experiments and the pacing is slick, I just wish Obayashi had more time and resources to do justice to the material.