In Japan, kidnappings of children by strangers are rare, but films by Japanese directors about this crime are not. The latest, Tetsuya Mariko’s “Dear Stranger,” is set in New York City, which makes its kidnapping more plausible, though its climax is a head-on collision of coincidences.
Scripted by Mariko, known outside of Japan for his ultraviolent “Destruction Babies” (2016) and his more comic but similarly bumptious “From Miyamoto to You” (2019), the film’s story unfolds almost entirely in English, though stars Hidetoshi Nishijima (“Drive My Car”) and Taiwanese Gwei Lun-Mei (“The Wild Goose Lake”) are not native speakers.
Filming abroad has become something of a rite of passage for elite Japanese directors such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa (“The Woman in the Silver Plate”), Hirokazu Kore-eda (“The Truth”) and Ryusuke Hamaguchi (the upcoming “All of a Sudden”). Though not in their league, Mariko has the backing of the Toei studio, which is betting that their first English-language production will give him a bump up. Maybe that’ll happen in Japan, where the sometimes stilted line readings of his two leads will not be as noticeable.
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