Shoplifters (2018)
★★★½ — Shoplifters (2018)
The final act of Shoplifters hit me like a slow wave I didn't see coming. You spend an hour and a half settling into the rhythms of this cramped, cluttered little household, getting comfortable with the warmth inside it, and then Hirokazu Kore-eda pulls the rug out. Not with melodrama or cheap twists. With quiet, devastating questions. Who are these people to each other, really? What does family actually mean when the paperwork says one thing and lived experience says something else entirely?
On paper, the setup sounds bleak. A loose assembly of individuals living on the margins of Tokyo, stealing from shops to supplement whatever scraps come in, crammed together in a house that looks like it's held together by habit and goodwill. There's a labourer, a woman who works in what seems to be a laundry or seamstress shop, a young boy who has been brought into the fold, an elderly woman whose quiet dignity holds the whole thing together, and a few others whose relationships to each other you piece together gradually. Kore-eda doesn't rush to explain any of it. He trusts you to watch, to listen, to notice.
And that patience is both the film's greatest strength and the thing that'll lose some viewers early on. The pacing is deliberate by design. You're not being made to wait for something to happen. You're being asked to live in these people's days for a while: shared meals, whispered conversations, a trip to the beach that's as joyful as anything I've seen in recent memory. The camera is observational without being cold. Kore-eda watches these characters the way you'd watch people you've come to love, with attention and without judgement.
The performances are uniformly excellent. Lily Franky brings a weary, lived-in quality to the father figure of the group, a man who is clearly flawed and yet entirely believable as someone children would trust. The actress playing the grandmother anchors everything with a stillness that says more in a glance than most films manage in whole scenes. The children are extraordinary, full of the particular kind of unselfconscious naturalism that you either have or you don't, and Kore-eda clearly knows how to draw it out.
The score is minimal, wisely so. This is a film that understands silence. The gaps between dialogue carry weight. A look across a dinner table. The sound of someone breathing in a small room. Kore-eda has always had this gift, this ability to find the emotional current running underneath the surface of ordinary life. If you've spent time with Edward Yang's Yi Yi (2000), you'll recognise something of the same sensibility, that slow, deeply humane attention to the texture of how families actually function, or fail to.
What the film does in its final act is genuinely remarkable. It reframes everything without betraying it. The moral complexity that emerges isn't tidy. There are no villains here, and that's precisely what makes it sting. The institutions that arrive to impose order on this ragged little household are not wrong, exactly, and yet something true and good is clearly being lost. Kore-eda holds that tension without resolving it, because it can't be resolved. That ambivalence is the whole point.
Is it perfect? No. There are moments where the deliberate pace drifts close to inertia, and a couple of character threads feel slightly underdeveloped by the time the third act arrives. But unforgettable? Absolutely. The image of that beach trip stayed with me for days. So did the final scene, which I won't say a word about except that it's one of the most quietly shattering things I've watched in years.
Three and a half stars. Shoplifters asks what it means to belong to someone, and whether love assembled from necessity is any less real than the kind you're born into. I don't think it is. Neither, clearly, does Kore-eda.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2026-03-15
Where to watch
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