‘Suzume’ Review

I have feelings about Suzume (すずめの戸締り) and it is, first and foremost, a stunning emotional gut punch which took me two showings to comprehend. At the first, I marvelled at the visuals, the care and the music. At the second, it was socked in the stomach and sobbed.

Spoiler warning etc… Seriously. Ready?

Iwata Suzume is heading to school one day when she meets a stranger, Murakata Sōta, who asks her if there are any ruins nearby and if she’s seen a door. Thinking nothing of it, she heads to school and only then remembers the ruins of an onsen resort up in the hills above her town in Kyūshu.

These ruins—haikyo, 廃墟, in Japanese—are common in Japan. They’re places once occupied by humans but, due to disaster or other reasons, are left to rot and are often overgrown and forgotten, they are also a very important motif within the film. I’ve always found them fascinating as Japan is not known for a lot of space so it has to be a major thing for once valuable land to be left fallow, either that or the emotional link is just that painful.

Suzume heads to the ruins to see if she can find the man but instead comes across a plain, unassuming door but when she opens it, there is a strange world beyond, with a sky full of stars, the dawn, galaxies and the sunrise. However, in a return to Shinkai’s love of liminal spaces, she cannot enter this strange world, only glance at it for a brief moment.

Freaked out, she accidentally steps on a stone, a bell sounds, and the stone statueーa Keystoneーturns into a white cat and runs off. Suzume scarpers and accidentally leaves the door open… Only later, at school, when she is eating lunch, does an earthquake alarm sound and notices a scarlet red mist—the body of a Mimizu—emanating from the ruins…

Thus does Suzume’s journey begin…

The story begins in Kyūshu but in a chase for the mysterious cat Daijin, Suzume and a transformed Sōta (now in the form of Suzume’s childhood yellow chair) venture first to Ehime, then to Kobe, Tokyo and concludes in Tōhoku. It really is a road movie with a lot of great locations covered in not a lot of time. The visuals are utterly gorgeous, of course, and I can’t wait to purchase the scenery book which always comes with the announcement of the BluRay release, as well as the storyboards and the various other media…

The pacing is tight, despite the many characters (who get a comeback in the credits but also are more than just incidental passersby; they leave marks on Suzume and she on them). The focus on ruined places is haunting and sad but also isn’t just an excuse to use them, rather there is an important thread tying these places to the reason why Suzume and Sōta must journey east, Tōhoku itself serves a very important purpose and it really is a gut-punch when Suzume’s link to the strange otherworld is revealed.

The combination of the music, the visuals (the otherworld, in all its states, is just stunning) and the emotional punch from realisation makes this an awesome film. It’s very much stand-alone, with not even a cameo and I’m actually for that (though it does share a seiyū with an earlier Shinkai film). RADWIMPS seem to have a lesser role, though the ending song is amazing, as is Toaka’s image song, Suzume, but the score is the best out of all the movies I’ve seen from Shinkai’s catalogue.

This movie is a meditation on lots of things: transformation, growth, the journey but also the healing process from disasters and it will take at least two viewings for the film to really sink in, and a third to truly appreciate it. This movie, while it does have elements of Shinto, is almost much more heavy on magical realism, with magical keys, doors which open on other worlds, the power of memories and just a hint of time travel.

I can’t wait to see the official subtitled version if only to discuss the lore properly! I’m probably going to see it a few more times before returning to the UK and that should probably say a lot about how much I love this film (tickets are 1000 yen a time… and I’m disabled). But yes, while Suzume is not connected to Shinkai’s other films, it needed to be stand-alone and that is where its charm lies, especially given the recent anniversary (that link is spoilerific!) on which the story has been built.

Suzume is out in cinemas now in Japan and will release outside of Japan in Spring 2023.