Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1982 novel A Pale View of Hills, with its unreliable first-person narrator and dual timelines of Nagasaki in the 1950s and England in the 1980s, presents clear challenges for film adaptation. It is to filmmaker Kei Ishikawa’s credit, then, that as director, writer, and editor of the novel’s new screen treatment, he guides the slippery narrative with emotional clarity and creates a sense of aesthetic unity throughout its temporal shifts. Yet for all its attributes, certain weaknesses reveal how some of the challenges in adapting Ishiguro’s novel may have proved too difficult to solve: many of the novel’s ambiguities are made explicit, a logically necessary choice that nonetheless smooths out too many of the novel’s fascinating subtleties, and Ishikawa struggles to give equal weight to the scenes set in England, which contain much less narrative action than those in Nagasaki. If an imperfect adaptation, A Pale View of Hills is at least thoughtfully made, and evokes lingering historical traumas with an appropriate moral sincerity.
In 1982, a young writer living in London, Niki (Camilla Aiko), visits her mother, Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida), in the countryside home she grew up in, which Etsuko is preparing to sell. Their relationship is loving but distant, particularly in the wake of Niki’s sister and Etsuko’s daughter Keiko’s recent death by suicide. Niki asks Etsuko to tell her about her life in Nagasaki before emigrating to England, wanting to learn more about her mother’s past before she moves out of the memory-filled home, and also hoping to publish an article based on Etsuko’s recollections. Etsuko, over the course of the visit, tells her about her friendship with a mysterious neighbor named Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido) in 1953. The film depicts how Etsuko (played as a younger woman by Suzu Hirose) and Sachiko’s friendship develops as Sachiko struggles to parent her troubled young daughter, Mariko, and prepares to move to the United States with an American soldier. The film also delves into Etsuko’s domestic life as she questions her relationship with her husband Jiro (Kouhei Matsushita), while pregnant and entertaining Jiro’s visiting father, Ogata (Tomokazu Miura). As Niki learns more about her mother and Etsuko reflects deeper on her past, inconsistencies and ambiguities emerge in Etsuko’s recollections, suggesting that the story she tells herself about her life in post-war Nagasaki and her subsequent move to England may not be entirely accurate.
The plot mostly follows Ishiguro’s novel, with two key changes. The England portions are from Niki’s point of view, rather than Etsuko’s, and the immediate catastrophe and ongoing trauma of the atomic bomb are discussed much more frankly in the Nagasaki portions than in the novel. The latter choice was suggested by Ishiguro, also an executive producer on the film: As Ishikawa noted regarding his and Ishiguro’s discussions about addressing the bomb more openly, “It has been 80 years since the war and, as memories begin to fade, it’s important to say the things that need to be said, to portray them clearly.” The post-traumatic stress, loss of family members, and social stigma experienced by injured survivors after the United States bombed Nagasaki are indeed portrayed clearly, and while this effectively foregrounds the major issue that subtly undergirds the entire narrative, the psychological shading of the characters suffers. The unwillingness, or inability, of the characters to fully face the horror of what they or their parents have endured propels the story forward in both content and in form, and so a morally and historically justifiable choice becomes a narrative hindrance. Other, equally significant narrative issues are also present. The perspective change from Etsuko to Niki falters because Niki is simply not as rich of a character as Etsuko, and in the film’s final act, Ishikawa’s efforts to orchestrate an essential rug-pull — achieved by Ishiguro on the page from a subtle shift in perspective impossible to film — comes across as heavy-handed, blunting the reveal’s emotional power, if not its thematic resonance.
The perhaps inevitable narrative stumbles are mitigated by Ishikawa’s graceful handling of aesthetic and tone. In collaboration with director of photography Piotr Niemyjski, Ishikawa creates canny visual distinctions between the two timelines. 1953 Nagasaki, depicted as being in a rush of rebuilding and modernization, is colorful and classical, with bright lighting and bold blues and yellows dominating the mise en scène. 1982 England is more muted, with primarily natural and diffused lighting, and a color palette similar to the 1953 timeline — except in uniformly darker shades. The aesthetic differences are subtle enough that it is not jarring when Ishikawa shifts to a different time period, but are legibly separate, and evoke how both settings are meant to be viewed: 1953 through the dreamy filter of memory, 1982 from a more grounded and naturalistic point of view. Ishikawa navigates the film’s frequent tonal shifts with a similar intelligence and subtlety, bolstered by emotionally supple performances from a strong cast led by Hirose and Nikaido.
Ultimately, though its weaknesses inadvertently highlight the difficulties inherent in adapting literature, A Pale View of Hills resonates as a poignant evocation of how the devastation of violence and war follow those affected across time, place, and generations. Ishikawa concludes the film with a perhaps overly optimistic coda, but he possesses an ability — crucial for this particular film — to balance devastation with grace. A Pale View of Hills ultimately does not outmatch its formidable source material, but Ishikawa has crafted an admirable counterpart.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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