Venice Review: Hirokazu Koreeda Delivers One of His Best Films with Look Back

After a period marked by ambition and drift in his work since winning the Palme d’Or for Shoplifters in 2018, Hirokazu Koreeda has returned to a more intimate kind of cinema for his latest film Look Back, a crystal-clear tale about friendship and creativity that feels closer to the lineage of Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman. This should come as welcome news to fans of the filmmaker’s early work, which was always at its most affecting when the focus, dramatic stakes (though never the emotional ones), and protagonists came in relatively similar sizes.

Look Back is an adaptation of a one-shot manga of the same name by Tatsuki Fujimoto. Fittingly enough, that particular medium and the intricate process of making it are both central themes of this story. It follows two artistically gifted girls as they grow from adolescence to young adulthood, first bonding anonymously over the four-panel sketches that they produce for their classmates’ entertainment, and later as budding and industrious collaborators. Thanks to their infectious enthusiasm and the images they create, along with the ones crafted on screen by Koreeda—shot on 35mm by DP Senzo Ueno, in what is somehow only his second feature—it is a film that should go, at least by my estimation, immediately into the upper tier of the director’s filmography.

Credit for this should of course first go to the film’s central quartet: Fūri Nanase and Rokka Okada, who play Fujino and Kyomoto up to high school, and Natsuki Deguchi and Aju Makita, who play them into their early 20s. Of these, Fujino is the more outgoing, and the film wisely sticks close by her side in the early scenes as she learns, with some alarm, that another manga artist has been pushing onto her territory in the school paper. For their first encounter, Fujino visits Kyomoto’s house to drop off her graduation diploma (the girl appears to have a form of agoraphobia) but accidentally slips a cartoon under her bedroom door. Upon reading it, Kyomoto bursts out and the two become inseparable. 

Charming as all this is, what makes the film so pleasurable to watch is less the adolescent friendship at its center than the joy of seeing two young people bond over a shared artistic passion. Koreeda responds to this, in turn, by capturing their artistic process with a level of care and delicacy that borders on ASMR. At one point, while adding a bold vertical shading line to a character’s face, Fujino’s pencil dramatically cracks and she has to bin the entire page—a moment to remind the viewer of the painstaking work being done and one that seems to linger, in its nerve-shredding way, over each subsequent time we see her draw. 

The duo’s first big project, a seaside tale that ends on a gorgeous two-page of a young man looking out to sea, gets them in Weekly Shōnen Jump after a meeting with its suitably awestruck editor (a kind supporting turn from Masaki Suda). Of Look Back‘s many exquisite moments, the shot of these two, taken from outside a snowy shop window, as they react to seeing their names in print for the first time is one that I think will stay with me for quite some time. From there, we see a move into digital drawing tools and serialized stuff as their artistic ambitions begin to diverge—also around the point Look Back takes a few narrative turns that will be jarring to anyone unfamiliar with Fujimoto’s anime. We should probably leave it at that. 

As the film played for press at Venice Film Festival’s Salle Darsena, it elicited a reaction among the audience that I can only describe as collective decompression. The score from Yuta Bandoh (who wrote the music for Belle and assisted Joe Hisaishi on The Boy and the Heron) might have something to do with this, but it was more the way in which his lilting guitar chimed so perfectly with the transcendent delicacy of Koreeda’s images—a collection of trains, street scenes, and wide-open skies that are enough to warm the heart and soothe the soul. It is a delightful return to form. 

Look Back premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival and will be released by GKIDS.