‘The Brightest Sun’ review: Hidetoshi Nishijima plays detective for director Tetsuya Nakashima

Dir: Tetsuya Nakashima. Japan. 2025. 129mins

A broken-down non-public investigator and his novice assistant are tasked with discovering a colleague’s assassin, forcing them each to reckon with the legacy of their very own parenting in The Brightest Solar, director Tetsuya Nakashima’s first function in seven years. Tailored from Uchiumi Bunzo’s widespread novel a couple of lacking boy with spina bifida, the movie is anchored by a stoic efficiency from Drive My Automobile star Hidetoshi Nishijima as a detective grieving the collapse of his household and his position as a father. In jettisoning the heightened sentiment of his early work, The Brightest Solar turns into Nakashima’s most emotionally grounded movie up to now, a compassionate and sensitively rendered drama that rewards endurance (regardless of meandering considerably within the third act).

A potent examination of parenthood and its energy to rework us, for higher and for worse.

The mixture of Nakashima and Nishijima’s names ought to guarantee The Brightest Solar a protracted life on the competition circuit following its world premiere opening the Hong Kong Worldwide Movie Pageant in addition to curiosity from area of interest distributors at house in Japan and throughout Asia-Pacific. Past the area a run in artwork home cinemas isn’t out of the query along with a spot with streamers.

Nakashima broke out in 2004 with the decidedly candy-coloured Kamikaze Ladies (the identical time Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Ladies have been trending) and the frothy musical Recollections Of Matsuko in 2006. It was his flip in the direction of the gritty that actually constructed him a following because the ’anti-Kore-eda’, particularly for the thorny Confessions (2010) and the way more violent The World Of Kanako (2014), each centred round dad and mom exacting grisly revenge for the premature deaths of kids. His newest continues this darker and extra confronting theme, and is a extra nuanced and potent examination of parenthood and its energy to rework us, for higher and for worse.

The Brightest Solar most intently recollects Confessions in tone and aesthetic, notably given the homicide thriller framework Nakashima and co-writer Nobuhiro Monma (who additionally labored on The World Of Kanako) deploy. The motion begins in June 1994, on the funeral of unethical, un-mourned PI Yonemoto (Jiro Sato), the sufferer of a brutal stabbing. Attending are fellow PI Mitsuo Satake (Nishijima), a drunk with no time for individuals and little curiosity in partaking with anybody. After the funeral his boss Teranishi (veteran Koji Yakusho) asks him to look into the murder as a courtesy, and produce the company’s trainee, single divorced mom Satoko Nakano (Hikaru Mitsushima), together with him.

The Brightest Solar performs like a thriller initially, full with detective thriller conventions from mismatched companions to purple herrings. The prime suspect within the homicide is Yonemoto’s final consumer, which underneath regular detective thriller circumstances could be the femme fatale. As a substitute it’s an unassuming housewife, Tomie Hirotsu (Haru Kuroki), who’s looking for the son she gave up 9 years earlier than who has spina bifida. Yonemoto’s findings immediate Satake and his assistant to mirror on their relationships with their very own kids and the movie additionally explores what it means to be a father or mother and the typically ethical conundrums that include it – together with the problems associated to kids with particular wants, nonetheless a clumsy matter in Japanese society.

The forged actually carries the day, with Nishijima setting the tone as a person equally worn-down and pissed off by his incapacity to reconcile his personal parenting trauma and find time for his teenaged daughter (Nanami Yamazaki), who’d clearly like him to attempt. He faucets an identical wounded vein he did for Ryusuke Hamaguchi, simply with extra self-destructive tendencies that masks Satake’s simmering sorrow. His cultivated distance is balanced properly by Mitsushima’s Satoko, who has her personal sorrows due to a single careless second she will’t take again, which is mirrored by the remorse and guilt Tomie feels for various causes. 

After a uneven begin that depends closely on non-linear enhancing and wilful obfuscation, the movie settles down right into a sleek rhythm set by cinematographer Shigeki Akiyama’s steely blue-grey wash that alerts occasions prior to now contrasted with the hotter tones of the current. The visuals are constant all through the movie, successfully levelling the enjoying area in a narrative with out clear villains and heroes. It’s a difficult stability to take care of, however Nakashima and Monma handle to impress thought with out being judgmental in the direction of their characters, regardless of how tempting it’s to use straightforward labels, notably in the case of our kids.