‘Great Absence’ Review: A Son Discovers his Father in a Deft, Complex, Wrenching Dementia Drama
variety.comJessica Kiang The belief that the dead live on in our memories is often the only comfort anyone can think to offer the bereaved, or those in the process of losing a loved one.
But for Takashi (Mirai Moriyama), the introspective adult son at the heart of Kei Chika-ura‘s quietly tectonic heartbreaker, that comfort is unavailable on multiple levels.
Not only has he been long estranged from his father, Yohji (a shattering San Sebastian Best Performance-winning Tatsuya Fuji), but Yohji’s own precipitous descent into the fog of dementia means that whatever Takashi can now learn of him, at this late stage, is jumbled and fragmentary and possibly false.
How can we adequately remember someone who cannot remember himself? Like so much of “Great Absence,” that question is posed as a kind of mystery, made all the eerier by the ordinariness of the clues that tease its solution — an uncanceled meal delivery, a missing car, a cellphone that beeps from an adjoining room.
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