A Pale View of Hills review – two-stranded adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro novel in the shadow of the A-bomb

2026-03-11 - 09:22

Kei Ishikawa’s take on Ishiguro’s first published work is frustrating and bland, undermining its fascinating characters’ emotional truths Kazuo Ishiguro has long been a subtle and potent figure in the movies, with his distinctively Anglo-Japanese melancholy. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s adaptation of The Remains of the Day for director James Ivory was a heart-rending study in regret; Alex Garland and Mark Romanek’s treatment of science-fiction novel Never Let Me Go was an excursion into strangeness and sadness and, as a screenwriter himself, Ishiguro’s script for Living, a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, was a wonderful transformation. But A Pale View of Hills, adapted by Japanese writer-director Kei Ishikawa from Ishiguro’s 1982 debut novel, is somehow frustrating and disappointing. It is a bland, soggy film whose contrived and anticlimactic surprise ending is not delivered with a clear satisfying twist and, for me, undermines our expectations of what we thought we would be told about the emotional truth of the main character and her life story. Continue reading...