Asako I & II

Watch Asako I & II (2018) online on iFILM — a Japanese-French drama directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 119 minutes, with Erika Karata and Masahiro Higashide in the lead roles. The film competed in the main slate at Cannes.

Asako falls hard for Baku in Osaka — reckless, magnetic, impossible to hold onto. One day he simply doesn't come home. Two years later, now living in Tokyo, she spots a stranger across a room who has Baku's exact face: same cheekbones, same build, completely different person. His name is Ryohei. He's steady where Baku was volatile, present where Baku vanished. She stays.

Hamaguchi — who later made Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy — was already working out his signature method here: extended dialogue scenes, silences that carry the weight, close-ups timed to land exactly when characters are most exposed. The film is quietly unsettling in the way it shows love operating as a form of mistaken identity. Stream Asako I & II online on iFILM.