At first, one might draw comparisons to anime film A Silent Voice and its contemporary, Makoto Shinkai's Your Name, but the two anime can not be more different in style and tone.
A Silent Voice is a nuanced, oftentimes surprisingly dark examination of friendship and guilt. Nearly all of its characters are wracked by guilt over something they did as children - the bullying and social isolation of a deaf student named Shoko Nishimiya. Ironically, one of the persons least affected by the bullying is Shoko herself - or at least that's what it seems at first. The movie follows protagonist Shoya Ishida as he tries to reconnect with all of the friends he lost thanks to this event.
The movie captures the pain of school life as lived by its characters. Though many of you may not have experienced something as extreme as what the protagonists experienced in this film, you will find yourself relating to them and their problems at least in some way.
Ishida learns that reconnecting is not easy. the film begins with Ishida's attempted suicide because he lacks the self worth to move on, and it only marginally gets better from there. Both this movie and the manga feature characters that act like anime tropes on the outside but are deeply scarred and/or broken individuals on the inside, all of them emotionally needy in some way. While the manga has more breathing room to develop these characters and their motivations, the anime does a surprisingly good job comprssing 50-odd chapters into a two hour movie.
The film balances its darkness with moments of levity, which elevates the overall mood. A Silent Voice's dramatic moments still shine through despite the limitations of adaptation, carried by Kyoto Animation's overall high quality production. A Silent Voice is a a parade of broken people, finding solace in their own brokenness.
Hong Sang-soo is a filmmaker with a very distinct style that has evolved over the years. His characters are usually men in creative disciplines who try to find meaning in their lives by pursuing (often drunkenly) the opposite sex. In his latest film, On the Beach at Night Alone, Hong shakes it up a bit, where a woman (Kim Min-hee) involved in a creative discipline (she's an actress) tries to (drunkenly at times) find the meaning of her failed love with a man.
The movie is, true to Hong's work especially post Tale of Cinema, paced gently, full of drunken outbursts and impassioned declarations. Hong makes the mundane seem fascinating when he does his magic, often zooming in and out of characters during long takes, at times in asymmetrical frames.
Hong seems to be self reflective at times during this movie, and there's the lingering sense of the fourth wall just out of reach, as his films tiptoe the line between reality and fiction, where the camera feels like a separate character.
Hong's films are full of love and regret drenched in beer and soju. There's no shortage of that in this film, and while many can accuse the director of being a one note creator, it's hardly true - as one of the characters says during the film's climax, it's in the craft and filmmaking where we see variations in the theme. And seeing Hong evolve from his early works like Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors to Woman is the Future of Man and now to this, the progression of the work is clear, like movements in an orchestral piece.
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