I’ll tell you right now and I’ll tell you clear: this movie may not work for you. It didn’t work for a bunch of people at the Fest, and even others who did enjoy it had some well-earned reservations. Before We Vanish is long and it’s slow and it tries to juggle tones in a manner that does not always add up.
But boy oh boy did I love it.
Before We Vanish is about what might be the most low-key alien invasion in cinema history. Three extraterrestrial beings arrive on earth and possess the bodies of unassuming folks in Japan. Their goal: to gather “conceptions” and better understand exactly what makes humans tick before they summon their people to come wipe us out. The wrinkle: When the aliens take a conception, the person they take it from loses it, i.e. an agoraphobic man loses his understanding of “possession” and is suddenly free to go anywhere without fear of loss. Not all the victims are freed in this manner, with some being wiped almost completely and others losing any semblance of identity.
The aliens end up split up, and the film follows their parallel tracts. Two of them end up as teenagers and leave a trail of carnage and mayhem in their wake, accompanied by a cynical journalist who joins them because he’s looking for a story and ends up reluctantly accomplice to the overthrowing of the earth.
The third takes over the male half of a married couple going through a fraught period in their relationship, and his ‘guide’ is his human vessel’s wife. This portion of the movie…it’s Starman. Sure, it’s not exactly Starman and there are things that happen to differentiate it from Starman but…yeah, it’s Starman. In depicting the way that “Shinji” integrates into his human body and human society, Ryuhei Matsuda captures the same sort of dawning consciousness that Jeff Bridges defined so perfectly in John Carpenter’s underrated sci-fi effort. It’s well-played, but feels somewhat paint by numbers if you know that earlier film (or any of its myriad rip offs).
Before We Vanish was adapted (apparently very faithfully) from a play that remains quite popular in Japan, and while the film certainly does not feel stagebound, you can feel those origins in the deliberate pacing and the downplayed sci-fi element. While Before We Vanish is nominally science fiction, the nature of the aliens and their invasion is deliberately handled with a shrug, the mechanics handwaved away.
I’m also fairly certain that the level of carnage on display throughout Before We Vanish has been amped up from the stage version, unless Japanese theater makes great use of splatter-protection ponchos. The opening scene sets the stage for a very different sort of film, unloading gallons of blood before the credits so much as roll. The film’s sedate pace is intermittently broken by grand flourishes of violence, well-staged by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (who came to attention for American genre fans thanks to Pulse), with gunblasts that feel apocalyptic given the otherwise quiet tempo.
So it’s a sci-fi movie with few to no sci-fi elements, a sedate art film with outbursts of gore and carnage, a comedy more interested in examining human nature than earning laughs, and a drama that attacks its inquiries through a genre lens. Who the hell is this movie for?
Me.
And hell, maybe if I was watching it at any other point in my life I would’ve shrugged this off too. But I didn’t watch Before We Vanish at any other time, I watched it now. And right now, with all the shit going on in this country and this world, was when I needed to see a movie that holds up humanity as weird and maddening and nonsensical and absolutely beautiful and resilient. Before We Vanish looks at the things in this world that are ephemeral and intangible and maybe impossible to define, and it declares that not only are those things valuable, they are the things that truly define the human race, that will save us from the precipices that our nature and nature in general keeps bringing us to.
“Have faith in the future” someone says near the end of this, and I swear to God I burst into tears. It can be hard, man, really fucking hard to have faith in anything right now, so to have a movie argue with such passion and such clarity that we are not doomed, that we can make it through the darkest nights and come out the other side and keep moving forward, it punched my soul in a perfect way.
The whole cast does exceptional work, especially Matsuda, Mahiro Takasugi, and Yuri Tsunematsu as the invaders. Matsuda does lovely work as the most human of the aliens, while Taksugi and Tsunematsu rip it up as two beings with exactly zero moral compass in how they interact with the world at large. Tsunematsu in particular is a whirling dervish in pint-sized form, and the movie takes ongoing glee in watching her smash her way through anyone who tries to stand against her.
As I said at the top, Before We Vanish may well not be for you. It’s a strange combination of flavors that you wouldn’t necessarily think go together, and even if they did, the film’s pacing is deliberate enough to still put you off. But sometimes you find a movie that is so perfectly attuned to where your head is at and what your heart is at that it overrides those critical faculties and just works.
Before We Vanish is such a film.