Critics reviews

Typhoon Club features some incredibly uncomfortable moments, and Sōmai’s camera isn’t afraid to show us the worst of what humanity can be... it’s rare to see a coming-of-age film this assured and with this much to say.

[T]he film [ends] on a haunting note, albeit one that refreshingly sidesteps the usual clichés of the coming-of-age movie. There are no simplistic epiphanies here that prime the characters to face the uncertainty of adulthood, and even the most vulnerable confessions don’t necessarily lead to self-understanding... Sômai Shinji’s anti-coming-of-age film is as beautiful as it is troubling

This is a coming-of-age drama, but without any sentimentality towards its young characters... The typhoon that these schoolmates use an excuse not to go home also serves as an objective correlative for their raging, potentially dangerous emotions...

Somai’s characteristically long takes add to the etherial atmosphere as do his occasional forays into the strange...

Somai directed two excellent spins on the type of coming-of-age tale in which intense physical trials become a test of character. Typhoon Club (1985), commonly cited as the director’s masterpiece... [and] Catch (1983)...

The students are less distinctively characterized than the settings they inhabit. At best they are mouthpieces for the writer, Yuji Katch, who evokes the memory of Yukio Mishima, and the director, Shinji Somai, whose often strikingly beautiful images are more interesting than the lives of the people being photographed.