‘All The Lovers In The Night’ review: Yukino Kishii and Tadanobu Asano star in challenging, insightful Japanese drama

Dir/scr: Yukiko Sode. Japan. 2026. 139mins

A willfully insular and dissociated young woman in Tokyo takes her first painful and terrifying steps towards romantic connection and finds the road littered with all manner of landmines. Yukiko Sode’s All The Lovers In The Night is a deliberate and metaphorical chronicle of emotional healing, and the impact our secrets and contradictions can have on our lives. It’s a challenging but also keenly insightful meditation of the self-fulfilling cycles of trauma and the nature of love.

Takes its time in laying its foundation

Writer and director Sode made waves in 2021 with her third feature Aristocrats, a drama about two modern Japanese women trapped by rigid gender and class norms as filtered through their relationship with the same man. Like with that gently probing film, Sode’s latest slots in nicely with broader movement in Japanese cinema of often slow-burning drama about the crushing weight of traditional obligations and societal expectations, particularly on women. Anchored by strong performances and shot on tactile 16mm film, All The Lovers In The Night should have a life on the festival calendar following its Cannes Un Certain Regard premiere. Its contemporary themes could generate interest for a theatrical run in major Asian markets and an arthouse release overseas.

Adapting from Mieko Kawakami’s aggressively subjective 2011 novel – which, unsurprisingly, is reminiscent of Ottessa Moshfegh My Year of Rest and Relaxation – Sode has her work cut out for her thanks to the book’s first-person structure and its reliance on internalisation and flights of fancy. She is helped by the compelling duo of rapidly emerging actor Yukino Kishii, who’s demonstrated a taste for playing unconventional women in Small, Slow But Steady and SinSin And The Mouse, and Tadanobu Asano, the Ichi The Killer breakout now best known for FX’s Shogun. The film takes its time in laying its foundations, occasionally sacrificing the pacing to do so and stumbling around its dreamy elements. Ultimately, though, the film works as a fantastical character study about how loneliness and love fit together in the real world.

All The Lovers’ protagonist Fuyuko (Kishii, equal party steely and birdlike) is shockingly oblique and hard to like, with Sode in no hurry to explain or justify her behaviour. It’s a relatively bold choice designed to recall the book’s stream of consciousness, which sometimes feels shoehorned into the film’s otherwise conventional three-act narrative structure. Fuyuko works from home as a freelance proofreader, perfectly content in a life so solitary as to be paralysing. She’s uncomfortable around strangers and awkward in social spaces. She dresses in clothes three sizes too big, and to say she’s non-communicative is an understatement, even around her lone so-called friend and colleague Hijiri (Misato Morita, from Eiji Uchida’s Night Flower). Hijiri is as outgoing and comfortable in her skin as Fuyuko is not, and the contrast provides the basis for Sode’s examination of how women can be positioned against to each other to deleterious effect – even when they don’t realise it.

One afternoon, high school physics teacher Mitsutsuka (Asano) barges into Fuyuko’s strictly regimented life when he helps her out of a tight spot after she vomits in an office building hallway and her purse goes missing when she falls asleep in its cafeteria. Despite her clear drinking problem, Mitsutsuka and Fuyuko strike up a tentative friendship predicated on his explanations of how light works and the minutiae of particle matter. Their bond transforms into a romantic one, coloured by untruths and a past trauma (detailed in flashback) that arrests each of them in their own static emotional state. All of it is captured in warm, light-shifting compositions by cinematographer Yasuyuki Sasaki (Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud), and with a light touch from Sode.

Nothing about All The Lovers In The Night is especially revelatory, and Sode isn’t particularly interested in re-inventing the wheel as it pertains to this kind of portrait of a woman on the proverbial verge. The film’s success rests with its execution, buoyed by the cautious dynamic between Kishii and Asano, and a stealth MVP turn by Morita, whose assured Hijiri provides a thematic and aspirational counterpoint to Kishii’s wounded Fuyuko. There’s a veracity to their relationship that’s heartbreaking and infuriating, but ultimately hopeful.