If it rains for a short while, perhaps someone nearby successfully closed a door

★★★ out of ★★★★

Suzume no Tojimari (2022) [Japanese title: すずめの戸締まり]

Runtime: 122 minutes

MPAA: Rated PG for action-peril, language, thematic elements and smoking.

"Suzume" works best as an interesting adventure story, and maintains a similar consistency compared to director Makoto Shinkai's previous works, and although the final act doesn't reach its full potential, the messages he has to offer is worth waiting for.

Writer/director Makoto Shinkai once again shakes things up and presents to us a film so strange, I'm confident I haven't seen someone and a walking, talking chair chasing a cat across multiple cities in the past year or two. As usual, he never falters in the design section, presenting to us various landscapes, towns, and gargantuan creatures. While "Suzume" is an exhausting yet exhilarating journey about closing doors to prevent natural disasters, I didn't particularly care about whether Suzume and Souta would end up together.

Still, it's a slight surprise that "Suzume" contains almost no nods to his previous two features, Your Name. and Weathering with You. There are no character cameos or any hints that "Suzume" takes place in the same universe as the other two. The film starts with a dream where 17-year-old Suzume Iwato (Nanoka Hara) dreams about being lost in a neighbourhood and searching for her mother. As it turns out, her mother passed away when she was four, and has been living with her aunt Tamaki Iwato (Eri Fukatsu) ever since.

Suzume is then smitten by an attractive by-passer Souta Munakata (Hokuto Matsumura), who asks her for whereabouts to abandoned places. Out of curiosity, Suzume later heads to the abandoned place, observing a door that leads to a dreamlike, starlit field, in which she can't enter. A statue on the ground becomes a cat, and she flees back to school, only to observe a giant, red worm emerging out of the area (mind you, she's one of only few people who can see it).

When Suzume heads to the abandoned area, her worst fears are confirmed. Souta, whom she met earlier on, attempts to shut the door to no avail, and Suzume lends her help, in which they successfully shut the door. If you think that it's not going to get crazier, hang on with me. Suzume brings Souta back to a house, a stray cat appears, speaks, then transforms Souta into Suzume's childhood chair. Souta, as the chair, starts chasing the cat, Suzume follows them, they enter a ferry headed to Ehime, and continue chasing the cat while simultaneously closing more doors.

What's most exciting is that the prospect of them closing doors never feels repetitive or a simple idea. Each event gets more large-scale, more dangerous, and even Suzume is tricked once and almost falls off a Ferris wheel in an amusement park. Shinkai draws us into this world of unusual, cataclysmic events, that we always only understand as much as Suzume does, and makes unspoken parts of the narrative even more interesting.

He's also created an unnecessarily lethargic feel as they rush to chase the cat and prevent upcoming disasters. Thankfully, Suzume's journey is also about giving good to people and receiving it, the difficulties in taking care of children, and unexpected messages about reconciliation of families after heated arguments, and about coping with disasters and accepting change, for better and for worse.

It also moves in more twisty ways compared to Weathering with You, with random, new characters popping up, the real intention of the stray cat being revealed, and a road trip about saving Souta when it feels like "Suzume" is about to end. The unpredictable flow also gives way to the messages it wants to convey, which ring a bell and is compelling. The best parts in the second half of "Suzume" is about families staying together after tough situations or emotional conflicts, and it also ends in a soothing, heartfelt manner that we look forward to the sunshine at the edge of the horizon.

However, it also focuses a tad too much on the big-scale events, that the final act loses a bit of credulity. The subplot of Suzume saving Souta is structurally similar to his two previous features, where the main character embarks on a journey to save their love interest. This time around, it never feels like a romance is developing, and it doesn't exactly justify why the rescue must happen, draining some of the full impact of the scene. The underlying themes about trauma and recovering from disastrous events may also be a little too subtle, and I initially found it difficult to catch what he was attempting to convey the first time around. 

Fortunately, Shinkai knows how to brilliantly end his film, making the entire journey worthwhile. While he remains an interesting storyteller, and I'm looking forward to other oddball stories he has to offer, his punches are starting to weaken a little this time around.