Eureka is a behemoth of a film. It moves slowly, ploddingly; each scene and moment breathes; you have the time and space to notice all the little significant details of the characters' world, their struggle to engage with this world, and their struggle to relate to one another. I suppose it could be categorised as "slow cinema", with its long runtime, often stationary or gently-panning camerawork, and preference for longer takes that invite us to exist alongside the characters instead of rapid cuts that engage us as spectators, but don't get me wrong—this is a film in which things are constantly happening, where the plot never stops moving forward, when every five minutes there are new situations and developments for the characters to reckon with, and you can never predict where the film will lead us next.
Eureka is at its heart the story of three people brought together by the trauma of surviving a mass shooting event. It's a story about humans, about the way we respond to violence in the real world, without all the fanfare and excitement that movies usually bring to violent events. It's a portrayal of how such events shape our lives, rewrite our psychology, isolate us from our society, and how the road to healing from this sort of trauma is an internal one yet one we cannot walk alone. Director Aoyama Shinji's principal inspiration for writing the film was the 1995 Tokyo Metro sarin gas attacks (although he says he drew as well from reading accounts of Holocaust survivors and Israeli terrorists and from Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour), and as a result you could easily interpret the film as a microcosm of Japanese society as a whole: grappling with the collective trauma of past horrors, looking for a way to move forward, and yet failing to provide any sort of meaningful mental health support to the victims who experienced those horrors firsthand.
What most impressed me about Eureka, however, is that this is a film in which characterisation is not exhibited but rather implied. We learn who the characters are not by the things they say but by what they don't say, by their smallest gestures, or by their occasional outbursts. The characters are all disaffected, the world for them is muted and grey, and so for the audience as well we experience their world in sepia, until that final shot when everything bursts back into colour. Like real life, the film isn't about destinations but about struggling to figure out where to go, and like in real life, neither the characters nor the audience are ultimately given any clear answers. There is no resolution, no profound "eureka" moment—this is simply a film about people existing, trying to remember how to live.
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jakoblover
how the fuck is this not in more listsepicureanlotus
Eureka is a behemoth of a film. It moves slowly, ploddingly; each scene and moment breathes; you have the time and space to notice all the little significant details of the characters' world, their struggle to engage with this world, and their struggle to relate to one another. I suppose it could be categorised as "slow cinema", with its long runtime, often stationary or gently-panning camerawork, and preference for longer takes that invite us to exist alongside the characters instead of rapid cuts that engage us as spectators, but don't get me wrong—this is a film in which things are constantly happening, where the plot never stops moving forward, when every five minutes there are new situations and developments for the characters to reckon with, and you can never predict where the film will lead us next.Eureka is at its heart the story of three people brought together by the trauma of surviving a mass shooting event. It's a story about humans, about the way we respond to violence in the real world, without all the fanfare and excitement that movies usually bring to violent events. It's a portrayal of how such events shape our lives, rewrite our psychology, isolate us from our society, and how the road to healing from this sort of trauma is an internal one yet one we cannot walk alone. Director Aoyama Shinji's principal inspiration for writing the film was the 1995 Tokyo Metro sarin gas attacks (although he says he drew as well from reading accounts of Holocaust survivors and Israeli terrorists and from Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour), and as a result you could easily interpret the film as a microcosm of Japanese society as a whole: grappling with the collective trauma of past horrors, looking for a way to move forward, and yet failing to provide any sort of meaningful mental health support to the victims who experienced those horrors firsthand.
What most impressed me about Eureka, however, is that this is a film in which characterisation is not exhibited but rather implied. We learn who the characters are not by the things they say but by what they don't say, by their smallest gestures, or by their occasional outbursts. The characters are all disaffected, the world for them is muted and grey, and so for the audience as well we experience their world in sepia, until that final shot when everything bursts back into colour. Like real life, the film isn't about destinations but about struggling to figure out where to go, and like in real life, neither the characters nor the audience are ultimately given any clear answers. There is no resolution, no profound "eureka" moment—this is simply a film about people existing, trying to remember how to live.
jotesaw
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