To the Ends of the Earth (2019)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has built one of the most distinctive careers in contemporary Japanese cinema, arriving at international recognition on the back of unsettling genre films like Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001) before gradually broadening his scope into quieter, more domestically scaled dramas. To the Ends of the Earth, released in 2019, represents perhaps his most geographically ambitious departure: a Japanese-Uzbek co-production filmed almost entirely on location in Central Asia, commissioned partly to mark the 2018 Japan-Uzbekistan friendship year. It is a rare thing, a film shaped as much by diplomatic and cultural exchange as by purely artistic intent, and that unusual origin gives it a flavour you are unlikely to find anywhere else. The Uzbekistan that appears on screen is neither the tourist-board version nor the shorthand backdrop familiar from Western thrillers. Markets, Soviet-era apartment blocks, wide dusty roads and the flat shimmer of the Aral Sea region all register with an unhurried attention that feels earned rather than incidental.
The production brought together Japanese studios King Records and Tokyo Theatres Company alongside Uzbekkino and Loaded Films, a combination that presumably required considerable organisational patience on all sides. Kurosawa regular Shota Sometani appears in support (Sometani has been a fixture in the director's recent work), joined by Tokio Emoto, Ryo Kase and Uzbek actor Adiz Radjabov. The lead, however, is Atsuko Maeda, a former member of the enormously popular idol group AKB48 who has since built a credible screen presence in Japanese film and television. Casting her here is pointed: Maeda's background in manufactured, audience-pleasing performance sits in interesting tension with the character she plays, a young TV presenter called Yoko who fronts a travel variety programme while quietly carrying anxieties that the relentless forward motion of production work keeps submerged. It is a polished but unremarkable performance in some respects, yet the casting choice itself does a fair amount of quiet work. If you are curious about how East Asian cinema handles the gap between public persona and private discomfort, it is worth looking at Edward Yang's Yi Yi (2000), which draws on similar tensions between social performance and inner life, albeit in a very different register. Kurosawa's approach here is more elliptical, leaning on the kind of off-screen suggestion and extended takes for which he is well known, though the genre scaffolding that usually holds those techniques in place is largely absent. For a sense of how effectively he deploys atmosphere and dread when horror conventions are present, the spare, unsettling The Snow Woman (1968) offers a useful, if oblique, point of comparison in the broader tradition of Japanese supernatural unease he so often draws on. To the Ends of the Earth strips much of that away, leaving character study and location to carry the weight, with mixed results.
I’ve always found Kiyoshi Kurosawa to be a fascinating filmmaker. He usually builds internal drama that parallels a more classic narrative conflict, often leaning on horror conventions (for which he's famous), and he’s a master of using classic editing, deep focus, and elongated shots to toy with the off-screen space.
In To the Ends of the Earth (2019), starring Atsuko Maeda as a Japanese TV presenter named Yoko navigating the complexities of filming a travel show in Uzbekistan, you can see all these directorial trademarks clearly at play.
I have to admit, I was really enjoying the first half of the film. What makes it work so well early on is how Yoko’s internal frustrations interact and intensify against a backdrop of much larger social friction. The film does a brilliant job highlighting an incredibly exploitative work dynamic, not just on a personal level with her crew, but in the broader context of a foreign production exploiting a host country for the sake of entertainment. The host nation being Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic, adds a really rich, layered political context that I found genuinely very interesting. For a while, it felt like a proper, sharp piece of social commentary.
But from the second half onwards, the film seems to completely focus almost exclusively on Yoko’s personal drama. Unfortunately, that internal exploration just isn't interesting enough to carry the final hour on its own. This deep dive into her anxieties and feelings is strangely empty. It’s also one of Kurosawa’s few films that doesn’t directly engage with a genre like thriller or horror, so I'd argue it's like George A Romero's weaker outings (such as "There's Always Vanilla") where you could say "stick to what you know". It’s a decent, visually striking film, but the shift in focus leaves it feeling a bit hollow.
A three-star film from Kurosawa is still a film worth your time in purely visual terms, and the Uzbekistan footage alone gives it a documentarian texture you rarely encounter in narrative cinema. But the reaction here reflects something that comes up occasionally with directors whose instincts are so tied to a particular mode: when that mode is set aside, you become more aware of what the scaffolding was actually doing. Whether you find the film's quieter second half meditative or simply underpowered will probably depend on your patience for internal drama without generic momentum. It is the kind of film that sits more comfortably in the memory than it does in the watching, which is either a recommendation or a warning, depending on the mood you are in.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2026-06-12
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for To the Ends of the Earth (2019) on YouTube
Where to watch
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