May 9, 2023
Suzume can be understood as a love letter to the past, and the things that we owe to the people who came before us in the places we live. Central to the story are Suzume Iwato, a young girl living with her aunt after losing her mother at a young age, and a three-legged chair, a memento from her mother. The story introduces the idea of gates - physical and spiritual doors that link this world to the afterlife - and Closers, people whose ancestral task is to shut these gates with the help of keystones that take the form of two cats.
Souta Munakata
...
is one such Closer who visits Suzume's town early in the movie and is turned into a chair by the western keystone. It's in this chair form that he spends most of the movie, where he is at his most likable and endearing. Souta and Suzume do have compelling chemistry, and it isn't necessarily their completeness as characters that falls short. However, Shinkai does a poor job of developing any sort of romantic tone between the two, and as a result the romantic undertones of the story's ending feel shoehorned and unearned.
Through Suzume and Chair-Souta's journey through West Japan sealing gates the movie raises the question of how we in the present are created by and interact with our pasts. It does this both through the voices that appear at these gates and the central conflict of how Suzume copes with the past trauma of losing her mother. The movie is at its best when Suzume confronts this conflict directly, through her interactions with various side characters and her relationship with her aunt.
At the same time it does a poor job of resolving this conflict. The story's primary antagonist is a formless, nebulous Evil (a rather useless antagonist permeates all Shinkai stories, while secondary antagonists (her aunt, Daijin) are smoke and mirrors, fading away under the explanation that they were under evil influence or otherwise misunderstood.
Suzume is an extremely compelling movie in many respects, which makes it all the more unfortunate that it does not deliver.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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