‘Nagi Notes’ Review: Kôji Fukada’s Gentle Examination of Intimate, Small Town Relationships Pays Off for Those with Patience [A-] Cannes

Kôji Fukada has spent the past two decades quietly consolidating his place in world cinema, advancing by increments from the sidebars to the main slates of Venice and Cannes. Though a full-fledged international breakthrough has so far eluded him, several of his films have secured U.S. distribution, with Film Movement serving as his steadfast American champion. His filmography polls respectably on Rotten Tomatoes, yet he has not quite won over the tastemakers and gatekeepers whose enthusiasm confers canonization.

His first competition entry at Cannes, Nagi Notes, may prove the long-awaited exception. It is, to be sure, no less divisive than his earlier work. Throughout its 110-minute runtime, Apple Watches flickered insistently across the Grand Théâtre Lumière, tiny illuminated defections marking the attrition of audience patience. Yet when the credits rolled, the fervor among its admirers lingered well beyond the festival’s customary, dutiful applause.

The film unfolds over nine days, each announced with the ominous punctuality of Ringu, and follows the arrival of Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi) in the titular town of Nagi, a place of exaggerated quaintness in Japan’s Okayama Prefecture where the distant thunder of military drills is a constant, unseen presence. No vengeful ghost emerges from a television set. Fukada has subtler hauntings in mind. His subject is the relationship between people and art, particularly when art becomes a substitute for the human connections they cannot quite manage.

Yuri has taken leave from her dispiriting work as an architect in Tokyo to model for her former sister-in-law, Yoriko (Takako Matsu, of The Hidden Blade and Confessions), a dairy farmer who spends her spare hours carving sculptures from wood and clay. Around them drifts a small rural constellation: Keita (Kiyora Fujiwara), a middle-school dropout; his best friend, Haruki (Waku Kawaguchi); and Haruki’s widower father, Yoshihiro (Kenichi Matsuyama, of the original Death Note franchise), who delivers the local radio bulletins in a voice of practiced calm.

This is the kind of place where everyone is seemingly up in everyone else’s business, much like the Ardèche village in Misericordia. Unrequited love hangs over the town like a low-grade fever. Long before Keita confesses his feelings for Haruki, Fukada quietly signals the boy’s sexuality through his truancy, jealous sulks, and awkward fixations. Even the openly lesbian Yoriko appears to channel her desires into her sculptures. As a divorcée, Yuri alone seems capable of distinguishing between attraction and the harder mechanics of sustaining a relationship.

The secret longings the characters have been carrying for one another are eventually disclosed with almost offhand casualness. By the film’s end, we know them with unusual intimacy. In any case, the revelations feel nearly incidental. Fukada is less interested in what these people have done than in who they are when left alone with themselves.

It is not enough for us to be told that Yoriko is a sculptor. Fukada insists on showing the entire process: the pencil sketches, the shaping of a clay maquette as she chats with Yuri, the sawing into camphor wood, the chalk marks, the deliberate chiselings that slowly release a face from the grain. We glimpse the finished busts crowding her studio and imagine the same patient labor having gone into each. One begins to understand why the film leaves some viewers restless and others quietly astonished.

Less persuasive are the explicitly philosophical exchanges between Yuri and Yoriko about the purpose of their respective crafts — Yuri lamenting that architecture, being commissioned, ultimately belongs to others, while Yoriko confesses she has no wish for her sculptures to be publicly seen or judged, preferring that they simply rot after her death. Fukada’s ideas land more cleanly when dramatized rather than explained, as in a lovely sequence at the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art, where Haruki invites Yuri to interact with an installation while, in the background, giggling patrons reduce it to a backdrop for cellphone photos.

Perhaps the film’s lingering mystery is its fascination with Taiwan, which occupies a role not unlike South Korea in Drive My Car: a nearby elsewhere onto which characters project fantasies of reinvention. Yuri once relocated there with her then husband and apparently learned enough Hokkien to sing an entire song in it — an impressive feat considering I’ve never mastered the dialect myself, despite it being my father’s native tongue. One suspects Taiwan’s legalization of same-sex marriage also helps explain its allure for Keita, who can scarcely imagine a future for himself in rural Japan.

Nagi Notes inevitably recalls the layered, quietly tectonic dramas of Ryusuke Hamaguchi — particularly Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (also a Film Movement release) and Drive My Car — though Fukada studied under another Japanese master, Kiyoshi Kurosawa. With both Hamaguchi and Kurosawa unveiling new work at Cannes this year, Fukada’s arrival feels less like coincidence than confirmation: another major voice has entered the conversation.

Grade: A-

This review is from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival where Nagi Notes had its world premiere In Competition.