To the Ends of the Earth (2019)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is one of those filmmakers I find genuinely hard to stop thinking about. There's a quality to his work, the way he uses deep focus and elongated shots to make you feel something lurking just outside the frame, that keeps pulling me back. Even when a film doesn't fully land, watching him work is instructive. And with To the Ends of the Earth, I'd say that's more or less where I ended up: admiring the craft, a little frustrated by the choices.
Atsuko Maeda plays Yoko, a Japanese TV presenter shooting a travel show in Uzbekistan, and right from the off you can see Kurosawa doing what he does best. The whole setup is brilliantly loaded. You've got this young woman trapped in a suffocating work dynamic with her crew, performing enthusiasm for the camera while clearly feeling something else entirely. But what really caught my attention early on is how that personal discomfort bleeds into something much bigger. A Japanese production descending on a former Soviet republic, turning its streets and its people into content, is an inherently political act, and the film is sharp enough to acknowledge that. Uzbekistan isn't just a pretty backdrop here. The specificity of that setting, that history, that geopolitical weight, gave the whole thing a richness I wasn't quite expecting.
For the first half, I was genuinely gripped. The way Yoko's internal frustrations interact with these larger frictions feels purposeful and alive. There's a real sense that Kurosawa is building toward something properly pointed, a piece of social commentary with real teeth. He's threading her private anxieties through a much bigger argument about exploitation, performance and the power dynamics that come with pointing a camera at people who have no say in how they're represented. It's good stuff.
Then the second half arrives and the film takes a turn I struggled with. The social critique quietly steps back, and we're left almost entirely with Yoko's inner world. And the trouble is, that inner world just isn't compelling enough to carry the film on its own. It's not that the performance lets things down, Maeda is committed throughout. It's that the script doesn't give her enough that's genuinely interesting to work through. The anxiety feels vague, the resolution feels borrowed. There's a dreamlike sequence near the end that I can see some viewers finding transcendent, but for me it felt like it was reaching for an emotional payoff the film hadn't quite earned.
What made me think of this is the Romero comparison that kept nagging at me while I watched. Even a director you admire has films where you think: this isn't the mode that suits them. Romero made There's Always Vanilla, a gentle relationship drama that nobody talks about, for good reason. Kurosawa's fame rests on genre work, thrillers, horror, films where the dread in the offscreen space has somewhere to go. When he stripped that away here, I kept waiting for something to arrive from outside the frame, and it never did. That's not always a failing, but here the absence left things feeling oddly hollow.
I think of a film like Yi Yi (2000), which also asks you to sit with quietly internal characters for a long stretch of time, but earns that patience by giving each character a genuinely layered perspective on the world around them. To the Ends of the Earth has that quality in its first half, and then seems to let go of it.
Three stars. Worth watching for Kurosawa completists and anyone interested in his visual language, which is as controlled and assured as ever. But it's a lesser entry, and I think he'd probably admit that stepping away from genre exposed a gap in the storytelling that the atmosphere alone couldn't bridge.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2026-06-12
Where to watch
Watch in the US
Stream: AsianCrush · Metrograph
Physical: Amazon US
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