Daihachi Yoshida’s black-and-white character study Teki Cometh follows the daily routines and ruminations of retired French literature professor Gisuke Watanabe (Kyôzô Nagatsuka). Divided into four seasonal sections — beginning with summer and ending somewhat ironically with the season of renewal, spring — the film’s first third mostly depicts the widowed and existentially troubled Daihachi in solitude, quietly preparing simple meals and writing articles for a travel magazine’s culture column. As the film progresses, he interacts more frequently with the rapidly changing external world: he visits colleagues, ex-pupils, doctors, friends, and several women who occupy ambiguous spaces in his fantasies and his life: a former student (Kumi Takiuchi), a young undergraduate (Yumi Kawai), and his spectral wife (Asuka Kurosawa).
Teki Cometh begins in staunchly banal reality, patiently documenting Gisuke’s routines sans diegetic music. In tandem with its movement from summer into the succeeding seasons, the film becomes increasingly ambiguous, and ultimately, quietly surreal. It doesn’t descend so much as it retracts into Gisuke’s fragmenting psyche, and it announces this retraction with the arrival of bizarre messages on Gisuke’s computer, which portend an invasive wave of dangerous refugees and shadowy government cover-ups.
Teki Cometh faces a representational dilemma in its movement from routine stability to narrative breakdown: namely, where does the protagonist’s interior life end and the object “real world” begin? Based on a 1998 novel by Tsutsui Yasutaka, the film is hampered by its cinematic medium’s limitations: it lacks literature’s unique, psychological expansiveness and immersion, and its inner logic somehow becomes both curiously opaque and overly literal.
With its psychological focus, seasonal chapter headings, black-and-white photography, and occasional SnorriCam shots, Teki Cometh abstractly recalls Darren Aronofsky’s first two features. Aronofsky’s black-and-white debut, Pi, also tracks an intellectual’s mental breakdown, and his second feature, Requiem for a Dream, uses seasonal chapter headings in its SnorriCam-peppered depiction of psychological disintegration. However, unlike Aronofsky’s divisive early features, Teki Cometh lacks narrative propulsion and distinct formal perspective. Depicted with a kind of level-eyed indifference, Gisuke’s accumulating uncertainties result in a plot that feels lost, even inert.
Steeped in literary references and entrenched in the increasingly vexed problems of a “post-truth” contemporary world corroded by social media algorithms and reactionary politics, the film is not without ideas. It gestures often at social commentary, but it fails to localize its emotional center. Teki Cometh is ably shot and directed, and it features an array of solid performances (Kumi Takiuchi and Yumi Kawai are the understated standouts). However, as it sinks into Gisuke’s mind, it pushes the viewer out. The lingering effect is nothing so much as a distant sense of uninvested bewilderment.
Published as part of Japan Cuts 2025.
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