"The father thinks that in Tokyo girls get pregnant."

Noriko wants to attend university in the big city. She lives with her father, mother, and sister Yuka.

She writes in the school magazine to change the rules and gain unlimited access to the computer rooms in the building. She spends more and more time on the computer and, by joining a website called Haikyo.com, she meets a girl named Ueno Station 54 who becomes her idol. Her goal is to meet her.

She continues to have conflicts with her father and asserts, "I was not alive just because I was breathing."

Noriko, absent-minded, stubborn, rebellious, a 17-year-old girl, takes advantage of a blackout and runs away from home to go to Tokyo.

She wants to live, feel, understand, observe... not be foolish like her classmates. She wants to build a past to become a new woman.

Noriko meets Kumiko, also known as Ueno Station 54, and they go together to visit Kumiko's family—a delightful, affectionate, and happy family. They later visit another family, and Kumiko behaves the same way. Noriko discovers the truth: Kumiko has a strange job. In addition to being responsible for the Suicide Club, a website that incites young people to commit suicide, she runs an agency that provides rented families for people who have lost their loved ones. She pretends to be a member of the family, trying to make herself a credible substitute for the deceased or missing person.

Recalling scenes from the film Suicide Club, here Sion Sono presents images of Shinjuku Station, where 54 girls had committed suicide by throwing themselves under a train in the presence of Noriko, now known as Mitsuko, and Kumiko. Meanwhile, Noriko's sister Yuka runs away from home to reach Tokyo, and their mother commits suicide. This begins the father's search journey, as he will not hesitate to face multiple difficulties to find his daughters.

Meanwhile, Yuka finds her sister and joins Kumiko's group, becoming Yoko. All three girls, under different identities, are hired by a friend of their father's to reconstruct the scene of the lost family. The outcome is surprising.

This award-winning film presents itself as a sort of psychoanalytic journey divided into chapters, with a dense narrative verbal density. The handheld camera focuses on the faces and torment of the characters and their fluctuating identities, between reality and fiction, in the game of duplicity and disguise.

The world is alienating, and the search for identity is an obsession, along with a structured instinct for death. Through continuous flashbacks, Sion Sono presents a thoughtful reflection on the theme of family ties: escaping from dysfunctional families characterized by a high degree of incommunicability to pretend the construction of others, a fiction that is revenge and redemption in the search for emancipation and freedom.

The original family that fuels the business of the family-sized supermarket... Is real life better or the market of emotions?

A dissonance of communicative modes that amplifies in a world that is only appearance and consumption; the possibility of constructing a new identity by buying other people's memories doesn't make much difference, especially if the original identity is so burdensome or insignificant.

Surprising, disturbing, intrusive.

11-Jun-2023 by Beatrice