Aliens stroll among us, preparing to invade by stealing our thoughts. What makes us so unique?…
Before We Vanish is a film about aliens. They come to earth as completely different versions of humans, and try to blend in by stealing thoughts and concepts from others. It opens with Narumi’s (Masami Nagasawa, Our Little Sister) cold husband, Shinji (Ryuhei Matsuda) who remembers nothing of himself, but isn’t the same, bitter man that Narumi fell out of love with.
Narumi wants to know who took away and replaced Shinji, I want to know who took away and replaced Kiyoshi Kurosawa. With films like Cure and Pulse, he was on the forefront of the Japanese horror wave in the late 90s and early 2000s, and yet everything seemed to change in 2008 when he released the moving, brilliant Tokyo Sonata. It wasn’t a horror film, but it may as well have been in showing how a family can be torn apart without any intervention required from murderers or the supernatural.
Pivoting genres isn’t an issue at all, especially when Kurosawa seemed to be just as good at making domestic dramas as gruesome tales of serial killers. The problem is that his films ceased to be particularly interesting. He wouldn’t swear off thrillers, making Seventh Code and Creepy, but both of these numbed the senses and relied on shaky scripts, a pale imitation of the films he made his name making.
Before We Vanish fits in nicely with the emotional sci-fi route he trod in films such as Real and Journey to the Shore. If the prospect of an out of form director best known for tight thrillers making a sci-fi comedy about discovering love doesn’t fill you with joy that just proves you’re in a sound state of mind.
Before We Vanish isn’t just concerned with Narumi and Shinji Kase, and the plot isn’t merely about their romance. Shinji’s body has been inhabited by an alien, and two other aliens have come to earth in the form of the middle school girl Akira (Yuri Tsunematsu), and the high schooler Amano (Mahiro Takasugi, The World of Kanako). They intend to invade and take over the earth, and require a human guide to help them out, a role accompanied by the hack journalist Sakurai (Hiroki Hasegawa, Shin Godzilla), who is simply seeking a scoop for this story.
The aliens operate by asking humans to visualise concepts such as ‘work’ or ‘self’ and stealing it from them, causing many of the humans to start behaving strangely when such ingrained ideas are removed from the mind.
Before We Vanish is played off as a comedy at first, which is the best idea it has. The first half an hour is full of humorous moments of humans acting strangely, adults behaving like children, and Shinji being found splayed out, having fallen over in many patches of grass. The dynamic between Sakurai and his two charges is particularly funny, as he slowly realises that he is in way, way over his head but has to keep going because he lives in fear of the two children who he is helping to prepare an assault.
The pairing that gets the most time, though, is Shinji and Narumi. This also starts out entertainingly, with Narumi’s sister offering to help out before leaving in a huff because Shinji steals the idea of being siblings from her. There comes a point though when the audience realises that they are watching an alien love story. It’s not necessarily that the love story is bad, though it is boring. It’s more that the film goes down a bland, formulaic route once it becomes obvious that this is what it is going to concern itself with.
A particularly annoying scene comes when Narumi takes Shinji to a church, where many adorable children are practising their singing. Shinji speaks to them, and then the priest (a brief cameo from Masahiro Higashide, Asako I & II) about what love is. The film had been gearing up to doing something like this for its whole duration, and it is at this very moment that it makes the full transition from quirky alien comedy, to boring alien romance.
And then, Kurosawa also tries to make an action film out of it, with the climax being full of bombast, explosions, and shaky special effects. It was at this point that it became abundantly clear just how unfocused the film was. Buying into the sci-fi, comedy, and romance angles earlier on would have been a stretch, but not wholly impossible. Before We Vanish has a big showdown climax for no other reason than it feels like it should. It comes out of nowhere, ends out of nowhere, and then we are left with five minutes left to tie it all together.
And then it hits you, the main issue with Before We Vanish isn’t its wanton mixing of themes and genres that don’t go together, it isn’t the lack of real threat that the aliens pose, it’s the utter lack of any narrative structure. Halfway into the film’s 129-minute runtime, nothing of note has happened, other than shenanigans central with Sakurai and his alien friends. This would continue until about 45 minutes before the end, when stakes are desperately added in in a vain attempt to prop up the film that is collapsing around Kurosawa and the audience.
It would be unfair to say that Before We Vanish is an unsalvageable concept, but by its nature, it wants to dip its does into the water of so many genres that imagining it as a competent piece of cinema requires some mental gymnastics. The actors do a fine job with what they are given, and the script isn’t completely devoid of chuckle-inducing moments.
What it is devoid of though, is moments that move you, that make you think it has really hit upon something about the nature of love; and any sense of tension, even when bad missile special effects careen towards the audience.
So Before We Vanish stuck to the brief of one of the three genres it had a crack at. Kiyoshi Kurosawa continues to wander aimlessly from film to film. Maybe he should go to one of his screenwriter friends and steal the concepts of genre, pacing, and tension from them. We can still cling onto the hope that he will return to form, but if Before We Vanish is anything to go by, he is a long way off.