Critics reviews

Sono's approach here is much more low-key and naturalistic than in the two films he made prior to this one—the epic saga of perversity Love Exposure and the anguished, wayward-youth manga adaptation Himizu—but he has rarely been so deeply attuned to the enduring struggles in Japanese society between young and old, history and memory, tradition and progress.

The film finds Sono folding his subject and his thematic text together so naturally into his newly languid style that the two end up canceling each other out, flatlining what would otherwise be an impassioned polemic. Sono's normally vivid compositional sense is thus rendered (save for a fiery, allegorical death sequence late in the film) bland and unmemorable, all grayscale hues and shallow, dimensionless visual planes.

As affecting as you'd expect is the footage of areas around the plant, seen as a wintry wasteland. Like Rossellini filming in bombed Berlin in Germany Year Zero, Sono has shot precious footage of ruins that testify to a calamity in which nature conspired with human blunders.

The director's stock company fills the roles of a family torn apart when its oldest members refuse to abandon their home after a 3/11-type event, and while the dynamic can sometimes feel a bit like a made-for-TV drama, the emotional wind-up is a heartbreaker.

The Land of Hope is easily Sono's best film since Love Exposure, and bests that achievement in a number of key respects. By the film's conclusion, Sono offers sociopolitical marginalization and emotional compromises befitting Douglas Sirk. Check the Geiger counter: something's in the air, all right.