Ryusuke Hamaguchi was born in 1978 in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. He studied literature at the University of Tokyo before enrolling at the Tokyo University of the Arts film school, where he studied under Kiyoshi Kurosawa — an influence visible in his patient, somewhat destabilising approach to genre expectations, though Hamaguchi has moved steadily away from Kurosawa’s horror-inflected work toward something more durational and conversational.
His early features — Passion (2008), Intimacies (2012) — circulated mostly on the festival circuit and established his central preoccupation: the gap between what people say and what they mean, between the performance of emotion and its truth. The films were admired but not yet widely seen outside Japan.
The Breakthrough: Happy Hour
Happy Hour (2015) is the film that established Hamaguchi internationally, partly because of its ambition and partly because of its extraordinary length: five hours and seventeen minutes, following four women in Kobe across several months as their friendships and marriages shift. Shot with non-professional actors using an intensive table-reading method — actors rehearse dialogue until it becomes second nature, then perform it on camera with a quality of attention that professional actors rarely achieve — Happy Hour won the Best Actress award at Locarno (given to all four leads jointly) and introduced Hamaguchi’s method to a broader critical audience.
The table-reading method is central to understanding his work. By the time actors perform dialogue, they have processed it intellectually and emotionally dozens of times; what emerges on screen is a kind of hyper-presence, a quality of actual listening, that creates scenes of unusual intimacy. The conversations feel like conversations rather than performances of conversations.
Drive My Car
Drive My Car (2021), adapted from a Haruki Murakami short story (and drawing on other Murakami material), won Hamaguchi the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film and the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes. The film follows a theatre director, grieving his wife, who is chauffeured to a residency in Hiroshima by a young woman assigned to him by the festival. It is three hours long, begins with a forty-minute pre-title sequence, and contains some of the finest scenes of its decade.
“Hamaguchi understands that Chekhov’s plays — which feature centrally in Drive My Car — are about the impossibility of saying directly what you mean, and he uses this as a structural principle for his own film: everything important is said sideways.”
Evil Does Not Exist
Evil Does Not Exist (2023), his follow-up, is a departure in scale and register. Originally commissioned as a visual accompaniment to Eiko Ishibashi’s music, it grew into a standalone film — shorter, more elliptical, and in its final act more disturbing than anything he had previously made. The Venice Silver Lion was the right recognition for a film that is harder to embrace than Drive My Car but no less accomplished. Full review →
Filmography (selected)
- Passion (2008)
- Happy Hour (2015)
- Asako I & II (2018)
- Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021) — Berlin Silver Bear
- Drive My Car (2021) — Cannes Best Screenplay, Oscar Best International Film
- Evil Does Not Exist (2023) — Review →