Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood (2010) is Vietnamese director Trần Anh Hùng's adaptation of Haruki Murakami's beloved novel — watch it online on iFILM. Tokyo, late 1960s. Student Toru (Kenichi Matsuyama) is still carrying the weight of his best friend Kizuki's suicide when Kizuki's girlfriend Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi) re-enters his life.

The two share grief the way people sometimes share a bed — not quite love, not quite friendship, just the pull of shared loss. Naoko eventually retreats to a rural sanatorium, and Toru keeps visiting while also falling for Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), a frank and fiercely alive fellow student who represents everything Naoko cannot be. The film doesn't hurry that contradiction toward a resolution. Cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin shoots autumn fields and damp forest paths as pure emotional texture — you feel the cold, the weight, the quiet.

Trần Anh Hùng resisted every impulse to soften Murakami's source material. The result is slow, bruising, and precise — closer to the novel's spirit than most literary adaptations manage. Stream Norwegian Wood (2010) online on iFILM.