‘The Parades’: Glossy afterlife drama is no ‘After Life’

What awaits us when we cross the great divide? In writer and director Michihito Fujii’s “The Parades,” departed souls with unfinished business in the land of the living are left to dwell in a limbo that looks like it was dreamed up by an Instagram influencer.

The main setting for this glossy Netflix original is an abandoned holiday camp with dinky bungalows and an al fresco bar, overlooked by a Ferris wheel festooned with lanterns. It’s equal parts music festival, wellness retreat and “Terrace House” — somewhere to chillax while contemplating eternity.

This is where Minako (Masami Nagasawa), a TV reporter and single mother, finds herself after perishing in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. She’s desperate to know if her young son survived the disaster and bewildered by the casual attitude of the other residents — who include a writer (Kentaro Sakaguchi), a former yakuza (Ryusei Yokohama) and a bar hostess (Shinobu Terajima).

By day, the ghosts are free to wander among the living, revisiting homes and workplaces; one of them even attends his own death anniversary. At night, they sing karaoke, share some nabe hotpot and sink a few drinks. They can only move on to the next realm once they’ve made peace with their regrets and obligations to those they left behind.

Once a month, the spirits scattered across the land gather to help each other find the people they’ve been looking for, both living and dead. How this actually works is never explained, although it allows for a few attractive sequences of torchlit processions, accompanied by an emotive soundtrack by Radwimps frontman Yojiro Noda (not the only point at which the film recalls anime heavyweight Makoto Shinkai).

For most of the characters, these reunions are all it takes to achieve closure. One exception is a garrulous movie producer calling himself “Michael” (Lily Franky), who resolves to complete his unfinished masterpiece. It’s a semi-autobiographical drama inspired by his student activist past and the great love he left behind, which Fujii depicts as a film-within-a-film featuring Ayumu Nakajima.

This provides opportunities for some paeans to the magic of cinema and a few sequences that could have been lifted from Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “After Life” (1998), another fantasia in which the deceased re-create moments from their lives on celluloid. “The Parades” is just as gentle as Kore-eda’s movie, but it doesn’t reach the same depths, either in its meditations on mortality and memory or on the nature of film itself.

If Franky’s character seems oddly specific in a movie that otherwise tends toward the generic, that’s because Fujii had a real person in mind: producer Mitsunobu “Michael” Kawamura, who died in 2022 and is credited as “project initiator” here.

Kawamura had a taste for more pungent fare, including Fujii’s “The Journalist” (2019), a gutsy political drama that won the Japan Academy Prize for best picture. I’m not sure what the producer would have thought of this tribute, which is closer in tone to Yoji Yamada’s dewy-eyed “It’s a Flickering Life” (2021).

Fujii at least doesn’t get overly sentimental: “The Parades” may be bathed in a warm glow of nostalgia, but it resists mawkishness. Still, Michael is probably overselling things when he tells his companions: “TV shows come and go, but films are unforgettable.” Not this one.