A film about recovery and resensualization. Written and directed by Shinji Aoyama, who was supposedly inspired by Jim O'Rourke's Eureka and Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation. Although I've never seen Tokyo Story, I've been told it leaves you deeply emotionally affected, but you cannot say how or why. This film is like that.

The story follows the three survivors of a bus hijacking - Makoto, the driver, and two school age passengers, siblings Kozue and Naoki - and their journey to recover from this trauma. After many seemingly directionless scenes, the film becomes a road movie. Makoto buys a bus and drives across Japan with the children and their college student cousin, Akihiko. The cousin provides the only real window into the other three characters, who are all incredibly opaque.

The immediately striking thing about this film is its running time of 3½ hours. This is not like The Seven Samurai, which flies by despite its length. This is a very slow, mesmerising film. Add to this the extremely terse dialogue, and you have a film that is not for everyone. Even the opening bus hijacking, the only real action in the film, is shot in a remarkably restrained manner.

Eureka is shot in black and white, and is full of beautiful long takes. The shot where we see the Akihiko chasing Naoki after he ran off to avoid doing schoolwork is astonishing. This should not be confused with the showy long take masturbation found in some films. Here, you'd hardly notice the lack of edits.

The children remain mute for most of the film, and I fully expected their vocal recovery to be a sickeningly sentimental indicator of their emotional recovery, yet when Kozue began to speak it was so subtle I almost missed it. The only real cheese is the final shot, in which the film fades into color, destroying the dreamlike atmosphere.

If you liked this, you'll probably like the Brazilian film Central Station.