Kazuo Ishiguro has long been a subtle and potent figure in the movies, with his distinctively Anglo-Japanese melancholy. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s adaptation of The Remains of the Day for director James Ivory was a heart-rending study in regret; Alex Garland and Mark Romanek’s treatment of science-fiction novel Never Let Me Go was an excursion into strangeness and sadness and, as a screenwriter himself, Ishiguro’s script for Living, a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, was a wonderful transformation.
But A Pale View of Hills, adapted by Japanese writer-director Kei Ishikawa from Ishiguro’s 1982 debut novel, is somehow frustrating and disappointing. It is a bland, soggy film whose contrived and anticlimactic surprise ending is not delivered with a clear satisfying twist and, for me, undermines our expectations of what we thought we would be told about the emotional truth of the main character and her life story.
