Two Seasons, Two Strangers (2025) Review
Director: Sho Miyake Runtime: 89 minutes Languages: Japanese and Korean audio; English subtitles Certification: PG (Singapore)
The film had already started when I entered the hall. I worried that I’d missed something important. But even with that initial concern, I found myself barely resisting against the lapses of microsleep that repeatedly hit me during the screening.
Two Seasons, Two Strangers has a film within a film. One takes place in a rainy summer and the other in a snowy winter. Both feature pairs of strangers connecting through their loneliness and melancholy. The summer story was “written” by the protagonist of the winter story, Li (Shim Eun-kyung), a Korean screenwriter working in Japan. Now, she struggles to write her next film. This slump is exacerbated by the sudden passing of her former professor (Shiro Sano), whose illness is implied through a debilitating coughing fit that attacks after he attends Li’s film screening. To get out of her funk, Li takes a trip to the snow-covered countryside.
As a(n aspiring?) writer myself, I was hoping to get more out of this film than I actually did. It was nice hearing Li express her writing struggles to the audience as, “The things and feelings that used to be fresh have been overtaken by words” and “I’m in a cage of words.” Well, I relate. And I also agree with the innkeeper (Shinichi Tsutsumi) who hosts Li when he opines that “a good work is how well it depicts human sadness.”
But apart from a few lines, Two Seasons, Two Strangers feels unengagingly empty. With its minimal dialogue, I suppose the film is trying to get away from words like Li is. So, something else must take its place. There’s not enough that does, however. I must’ve missed at least the first ten minutes, but from reading other reviews, it doesn’t seem there was much to miss. The visuals feel sparse because of how dimly-lit they were. Some were so dark that they were like how your bedroom might look right after switching off the lights: you can just make out the outlines of objects and not much more. Especially in a cold, dark cinema hall, I found myself in a setting conducive for sleep.
My experience of watching Miyake’s film made me think of something I read about Naoko Ogigami’s chill-out feature Glasses (2007). Before a screening of it at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, she issued the audience a sleep warning but suggested that nodding off is within the spirit of her film anyway.
Maybe nodding off is within the spirit of Two Seasons, Two Strangers too.
Rating: 2.5/5
Thank you to SGIFF for the Cinephile Pass that granted me access to this screening.
