Cottontail review – Lily Franky gives another stunning performance

In the intriguing opening scenes of Cottontail, Kenzaburo (Lily Franky) sets out across Tokyo on a little mission one early morning. Sneakily swiping octopus cuttings from a market stall, he takes his stolen packet to a favourite restaurant before it’s even opened for the day, the familiar owner happy to oblige his request to serve up the dish he’s brought in, paired with the finest beer they have. Despite being on his own, Kenzaburo asks for a second glass for the drink. Clinking both glasses together and consuming the sushi triggers the arrival of a young woman at the entrance. As the blurred figure approaches and greets him, a quick cut brings us a close-up of a decades younger Kenzaburo (Kosei Kudo) patronising this same restaurant.

The woman (Yuri Tsunematsu) is the young version of his future wife, Akiko (Tae Kimura), and this strange ritual that older Kenzaburo has performed is an attempt to relive the blind date where they first met. This marks the first of writer-director Patrick Dickinson’s deft switches between past and present in a film built around the fleeting nature of memory, as well as the reminders of our personal history that we leave behind for loved ones to fixate on – Akiko, we soon learn, has recently died from dementia.

At Akiko’s funeral, Kenzaburo receives a surprise letter from beyond the grave, via an envelope entrusted to an abbot until after she had passed. Due to her father’s work, Akiko travelled to England as a child, becoming fond of the books of Beatrix Potter and developing cherished memories of the English countryside that inspired them. In the letter, Akiko instructs both Kenzaburo and their thirtysomething son Toshi (Ryo Nishikido) to travel to Lake Windermere in England, so as to scatter her ashes at the spot captured in a photograph from her childhood, the back of which has the caption “Chasing a cottontail.”

Despite honouring his late wife in his own little ways, Kenzaburo seems less keen to respect her wishes for father and estranged son to both oversee the release of her remains. While Toshi, his wife Satsuki (Rin Takanashi) and young daughter Emi (Hanii Hashimoto) do accompany Kenzaburo to England at Toshi’s insistence, the distant old man keeps losing himself in memories of Akiko, impatiently departing London on his own and becoming more literally lost in a rural region he can navigate about as well as his fraught familial relationships.

Reportedly inspired by real dilemmas and relationships experienced by Dickinson (making his feature debut), the understated Cottontail offers a bittersweet rumination on loss and unconditional love. Much of its success is down to the gradually heartbreaking performance of the ever-reliable Franky, a regular star for Hirokazu Koreeda. Dickinson makes particularly sharp use of Franky’s extraordinary face, often opting for close-ups in the 2.39:1 widescreen compositions to keep Kenzaburo enclosed. It’s as though the wounded character himself is stubbornly refusing to share cinematic space with other people in the frame, denying opportunities for connection despite ample room.