YNOT at the Movies

Faces lacquered in white, bodies trained into discipline, emotions sealed beneath centuries of tradition: Sang-il Lee's epic "Kokuho" (国宝 | Japan 2025 | in Japanese | 174 min.) is a film that moves first through ritual and gesture before it turns to inner life. A box office hit in Japan, the film was Japan's official submission and shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and has also received an Oscar nomination for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. It carries the weight of cultural representation on its elaborately costumed shoulders.

Set in Nagasaki in 1964, the film begins with new year celebration when the life of Kikuo Tachibana (Soya Kurokawa), the 14-year-old son of a yakuza boss, is abruptly rerouted after his father's violent death. Recognized for his talent, Kikuo is taken in by the head of a prestigious Kansai kabuki household and raised alongside Shunsuke Ogaki (Keitatsu Koshiyama) of his age, the household's biological son and presumed heir. What begins as shared training and mutual dependence slowly curdles into a volatile bond of rivalry, resentment, and fragile loyalty, as the two boys come of age—Kikuo Tachibana (Ryô Yoshizawa) anointed to assume the mantle of the kabuki house and condemned as an interloper who seized it, and Shunsuke Ogaki ( Ryûsei Yokohama) fleeing the lineage meant for him, only to return and reclaim it.

Unfolding across half a century, the film traces their parallel rises and diverging fates through discipline, scandal, exile, and fleeting triumphs. Its operatic scale and tragic view of artistic devotion inevitably recall Chen Kaige's "Farewell My Concubine" (1993), another sweeping chronicle of performance and identity stretched across decades. The comparison flatters "Kokuho" in ambition, but it also exposes its limitations. While Chen's film binds personal tragedy tightly to emotional and historical consequence, Lee's narrative often feels more episodic, its time jumps serving scope rather than accumulation.

The film is at its strongest on the kabuki stage. The performances are filmed with grandeur and intimacy, capturing both the ceremonial beauty of the art form and the punishing physical control demanded of onnagata performers. Makeup, hairstyling, and costume are not ornamental but transformational, essential to how identity is constructed and dissolved before the audience's eyes. Both the adult and younger actors portraying Kikuo and Shunsuke are superb, sustaining continuity through posture, movement, and presence rather than overt imitation.

Offstage, however, the storytelling grows uneven. Several subplots remain underdeveloped or unresolved. The presence of Kikuo's daughter and lover never meaningfully reshapes his inner life, Shunsuke's exile from the stage and eventual return are treated more as narrative checkpoints than lived experiences, and how Kikuo survives the fallout of a failed act of revenge against a gangster remains frustratingly opaque. These omissions blunt what should have been the most devastating turns in an already tragic saga.

The handling of time further complicates the emotional impact. Major transitions arrive abruptly, with temporal markers that feel arbitrary rather than dramatically necessary. As a result, the characters' transformations, so meticulously rendered in performance and appearance, sometimes lack equivalent narrative weight.

Still, this arresting film remains a formidable cinematic achievement. Even when its storytelling falters, its devotion to kabuki and to the idea of performance as a consuming way of life is unmistakable. The film mesmerizes through spectacle, discipline, and craft, offering a rare and immersive window into a classical art form, even as it leaves lingering questions about the human cost hidden beneath the makeup, the gestures, and the applause.

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In collaboration with The Roxie, New People Cinema reopens in historic San Francisco's Japantown with a special weekend celebrating Japanese cinema. "Kokuho" screens on Saturday, February 14, 2026 at 6 pm.