‘Ranshima Bound’: Family fractures and buried truths collide in Hokkaido chill

With its stunning natural beauty, Hokkaido has become a go-to destination for tourists. The Japanese indie films set there are often on the chilly and grim side, however, as if unfolding under perpetual November clouds.

Over the course of two decades, Hokkaido native Yoshitaka Kamada has directed three starkly powerful dramas that fit this template: “Yumeno” (2005), “Tocka” (2023) and his latest, “Ranshima Bound” — with his bleak Hokkaido locations serving as backdrops to his characters’ stormier emotions. In “Ranshima Bound,” which premiered at this year’s Porto International Film Festival in Portugal, the action mostly takes place near Ranshima Station, a cutely retro Western-style building in the small harbor city of Otaru.

The story begins in Tokyo, however, where a middle-aged drunk is crossing a bridge when he spies a woman on the riverbank after she apparently attempted suicide by drowning. Next, we see the now sober man, Yoshio (Tomoki Kimura), on a train with the woman from the riverbank, Maki (Yuko Kii), after his brother called to tell him their mother tried to kill herself and is in a coma in a Ranshima hospital. (Why Maki is with Yoshio is for us to guess.)

Arriving in Otaru, Yoshio buys a dress and a ring for Maki in an antique shop and urges her to wear both. At the hospital, he finds his mother still unconscious and, when his younger brother Satoshi (Tomomitsu Adachi) arrives, introduces a silent Maki as his wife.

Here, the story could have conceivably taken a turn toward comedy, but Kamada, who co-wrote the original script, opts instead for the awkward tension of realism, with Yoshio and Maki hiding the truth from a probing Satoshi.

The brothers, it turns out, have not seen each other or contacted their mother for years. But when Yoshio finds her diary at the family home, he learns that she has terminal colon cancer. Her suicide attempt was seemingly motivated by fear of a slow and painful death.

The film’s focus, however, is not on the fate of the dying woman, who never utters a word. It is rather on the two estranged brothers and the one strange woman who have been thrown together and, by the time Satoshi makes his departure several days later, have revealed their suppressed thoughts and feelings — if not all their hidden truths.

Kimura, who won a well-deserved best actor prize at Porto, brings a lived-in authenticity to the role of Yoshio, a one-time punk rocker who now works as a self-described “concrete tester” on construction sites. Hollow-eyed and blank-faced, he is drifting through life, though a punkish rage still burns inside. When finally released, it is both funny and pathetic.

As the more conventional Satoshi, who has a wife, daughter and steady job, Adachi projects a jumpy duality. Outwardly welcoming to Yoshio’s new bride, Satoshi is inwardly seething at his brother. Like Yoshio, he is guilt-stricken about neglecting his mother. He is, in other words, a bomb primed to go off.

The film’s most intriguing mystery is Maki, who plays her role as fake wife in stolid silence but bursts shockingly into tears when the brothers begin to talk callously about disposing of their mother’s ashes. Like the brothers, she’s a lost soul from a troubled family.

“Ranshima Bound” refuses the easy consolation of a climactic group hug. The clouds over its trio never completely lift. To the end, they are intensely, achingly and, at times, absurdly human.