Pale light on the hills: modest and elegant (review)

An intimate and melancholy chronicle where memory becomes fragile light, weaving bridges between bruised Nagasaki and a bereaved present in England.

Etsuko lives in England with her daughter. But her memories take her back to Japan in the 1950s, when, as a young woman, she observed the fragile survival of a friend in war-ravaged Nagasaki. It is in this oscillation between present and past that Kei Ishikawa sets his adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel (The Vestiges of the Day) and navigates between Jane Austen and Kafka, elegiac memories and the existential traumas of conflicts.

What is immediately striking is the visual beauty; Piotr Niemyjski’s photo captures the scars of a city still bruised, bathed in a milky light which gives the story the texture of a dream. In these half-erased settings, faces count more than dialogue. The actors, in tune, all advance like ghosts: Suzu Hirose embodies a restrained Etsuko, whose every gesture seems weighted with regret, while Fumi Nikaidō, vibrant, lends Sachiko a worried, diaphanous energy. Together, they create a relationship of friendship and survival, an inverted mirror of that which, in England, unites Etsuko with her daughter…

At Cannes, some criticized the film for too directly removing the ambiguities of the novel, but this is paradoxically its strength: giving substance to what literature only sketches. Rather than a secret, Ishikawa films a confidence – transmitted from one generation to another, from one country to another. The intimate becomes universal, and the mother’s wound resonates like that of a people. By choosing clarity without renouncing delicacy, Pale Light on the Hills finds its balance: a modest, hyper-elegant and melancholic cinema, where memory is a fragile light that illuminates and warms suffering a little.

Of Kei Ishikawa. With Suzu Hirose, Fumi Nikaidō, Masahiro Higashide… Duration 2h05. Released October 15, 2025