I try to write unfilmable novels,” Kazuo Ishiguro has said, which suggests he’s doing something very wrong. Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day was converted quite beautifully into a Bafta award-winning picture. His acclaimed sci-fi tale Never Let Me Go was duly made over as an acclaimed sci-fi thriller. He’s the most cine-literate, film-friendly British author on the scene, a man whose unadorned prose translates serenely to the screen. So his efforts are in vain; he’s cursed with success in both fields. I’m guessing he tries to write unfilmable novels in the same way he tried not to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
For a brief spell, it looked as though 2026 might contain a logjam of splashy Ishiguro productions. Then Taika Waititi’s much-touted adaptation of Klara and the Sun (featuring Jenna Ortega as the “Artificial Friend”) stalled near the finish line, while Guillermo Del Toro’s stop-motion treatment of The Buried Giant has only just begun moving. That means we’re left with A Pale View of Hills, the durable tortoise of the trio, which creeps into cinemas next week. Lifted – if anything, a little too carefully – from Ishiguro’s 1982 debut, it’s a hushed, tense tale of buried secrets and banked emotions, the public and the private self; a ghost story of sorts that slides from a creepy 1980s England to a postwar Nagasaki still dazzled by the bomb. There’s a locked bedroom door at the end of the hall; a daughter who demands answers; a middle-aged mum who would rather not spill the beans. This family, we learn, has had to adapt and move on.
