A Director at the Height of His Powers

Our critic on the year’s most compelling film — a meditation on memory, loss and renewal.

The fictional film at the centre of this review returns to the same railway platform at different stages of one family’s life. Changes in sound and background movement do the work that a more conventional drama might assign to explanatory dialogue. Memory becomes something the viewer assembles.

The director’s restraint is not entirely comfortable; one long scene withholds resolution beyond the point of reassurance. Yet the final sequence gives that patience a purpose by altering the meaning of an earlier gesture. The result is a film interested in how people remember, as much as in what happened.

Illustrated inaugural edition · Fictional editorial copy