Critics reviews

Adventurous viewers may appreciate Kurosawa's ability to invest his psychotic antiheroes with a strange poignancy.

Kurosawa's films occupy the long moment when that desire turns into dread. From the outside, that looks like a moment of stupidity, which is rarely frightening. Bright Future's scenes of fingers dangling next to a docile sac of venom seem silly—until a viewer remembers that they would likely do the same, maybe just grazing the water instead of plunging into it. The unknown, with death as its ultimate form, is deeply enchanting.

Like most of Mr. Kurosawa's films, "Bright Future" casts its spell by drawing out the horror of everyday existence bit by bit, and then tossing in some otherworldly weirdness that makes the hair on the back of your neck try to run for cover.

There is a profound beauty and an exhilarating sense of mystery to the jellyfish in Bright Future, but at the same time it embodies Kurosawa’s melancholy, even despairing vision of the yawning, unbridgeable chasm separating his characters from each other.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa presents a hauntingly enigmatic, poetic, and understated portrait of rootlessness, apathy, and disconnection in Bright Future.