Mana leads a group of young people who have established a groundbreaking call girl service for elderly people called “Tea Friends”. They run three-line advertisements in newspapers that innocently seek “friends for tea,” and elderly “tea girls” are sent to the men who respond. As a number of elderly men seek both companionship and sexual relief, the business is blooming, and the relationships between the young and the older members of the group are essentially ideal. One day at a supermarket, Mana crosses paths with elderly shoplifter Matsuko, and offers her a job. Matsuko has grown disillusioned with her lonely twilight years, but rediscovers joy in being needed by others, and gradually becomes one of the most popular tea girls. However, the past of a number of the members , including Mana,eventually catches up with them,while an incident attracts the attention of the police, threatening the livelihoods of everyone involved.

Regarding the Koreeda factor, the fact that the movie presents a group of people who are definitely doing some good, despite the fact that they are breaking the law, until the law catches up with them, definitely moves into “Shoplifters” paths. Apart from this, however, “Tea Friends” is a whole other animal, and a quite rare film for that matter, as its story actually revolves around the sexual needs and endeavors of the elderly.


Among those, however, the one between Matsuko and Mana is definitely the one standing out, with the fact that they are both searching for someone to lean on, eventually finding each other, and that their relationship (prostitute and pimp) is one that would be very difficult to end well, emerges as the highlight of the story. This prowess also owes a lot to the acting of the two particular women. Rei Okamoto as Mana depicts both her overall coolness when dealing with the Tea Friends and her sadness, bitterness and despair when dealing with her family, equally convincingly. Maki Isonishi as Matsuko is also excellent in her own transformations, as she starts as a woman with no purpose in life, then finds a purpose through Tea Friends, before her mentality changes once more towards the end, in probably the most impactful scene of the movie.


The transitions in the film, both the mentioned and the last that concludes it, are handled excellently by Sotoyama, equally in presentation and placement within the narrative, with the editing also emerging as one of the best aspects of the movie in that regard. , it results in a fitting mid tempo that works well, although, once more, some lagging does appear throughout the movie, particularly in the middle part, which is what extends the duration of the movie to 135 minutes. Finally, the overall way the script works looks a bit unnatural on occasion, essentially showing that Sotoyama may have over-handled the whole thing, although this is an issue barely

In the first, Haruka, Nana, and Takanori visit the house of Sota, a band member who has not given any sign of life for quite some time. The house looks particularly run-down with newspapers covering every window, while Sota seems even more strange, looking a mess and acting like nothing is going on. As he calmly offers them tea, one of the girls steps into a green goo and transforms into a head-spinning, bloodthirsty demon. The trio feel death coming upon them, but Haruka takes things in her hands.
In the second arc, the owner of a bar has kidnapped a passerby and brought him to his bar, with the monsters eventually also showing their ugly face. In the third, it seems that monsters are kind of coexisting with humans, although the enemies to the latter still exists, with Haruka, who has become a chainsaw monster herself, becomes the protagonist once more.


As we have mentioned in the review of the short: Kenichi Ugana “plays” with two aspects. The first one focuses on hikikomori, with Sota acting like an archetypical one, in a fashion, though, that is the main source of comedy in the short, as his disconnect from what is happening around him is actually hilarious, particularly in way Uganda uses his presence for jump-scares. The second is the survival horror one, with the director building the terror gradually, first solely through sound, and then through both sound and image, as the movie takes a rather bloody, but also absurd and still funny turn.



The additional arcs add even more aspects. The concept of immigration and the alienation of foreigners frequently is hinted upon, with Uganda also touches upon the whole idea of ​​racism throughout. Furthermore, music becomes a central factor, with the punk sounds of ILA MORF OEL and Keefar becoming a central part of the narrative, adding both to humor and the grotesqueness here, but definitely in the entertainment the movie offers. Particularly the scenes that function as music videos are bound to stay in mind, also due to the accomplished editing of Masashi Komino, which results in a very fitting fast pace overall.

The prowess of Miyuki Wakamatsu's VFX, which result in buckets of goo and blood, in an approach that can only be described as grotesquely hilarious, is quite evident throughout, but special mention should also be given to the characters that appear here, inspired by movies like “Tokyo Gore Police” and even “Walking Dead”. The Chainsaw girl in particular, and the way Uganda plays with her preposterousness (having her work a field for example) is only matched by the mistress with the two chained sumo wrestlers, in yet another memorable image of the film. Finally, Shiho stands rather out in the role of Haruka, both as a human and a monster.

A prologue set in the aftermath of a fictional eco-disaster, introduces the Sudo family living in a tranquil suburban neighborhood. Yoriko Sudo (Mariko Tsutsui) is a woman in her 50s, defined by her roles of wife of a salaryman (Osamu, played by Ken Mitsuishi), mother of a disaffected young man (Takuya, played by Hayato Isomura) and reluctant carer of Osamu's bedridden – but well able to fondle her – father. Water is scarce, as probably contaminated after the earthquake, and bottled water has become a precious good. One ordinary day, Yoriko calls everybody around the table at dinner time, but Osamu has mysteriously vanished. Fast forward few years and Yoriko has found a balanced and controlled lifestyle on her own. With the husband long gone, the father -in-law now deceased and her son working in another town,she enjoys her life as a single woman.She works in a supermarket by day and is deeply committed to an unconventional religious group known as the Ryokumei-kai, or the Green Life Water Society. She dedicates her time to prayer and intensive study and the whole house is full of bottles of pure (and expensive) holy water. Her garden – once adorned by colorful flowers – has now mutated into a dry Karesansui, Zen Garden, where she carefully rakes gravel every day, to represent ripples in water.where she carefully rakes gravel every day, to represent ripples in water.where she carefully rakes gravel every day, to represent ripples in water.She dedicates her time to prayer and intensive study and the whole house is full of bottles of pure (and expensive) holy water. Her garden – once adorned by colorful flowers – has now mutated into a dry Karesansui, Zen Garden, where she carefully rakes gravel every day, to represent ripples in water.where she carefully rakes gravel every day, to represent ripples in water.where she carefully rakes gravel every day, to represent ripples in water.She dedicates her time to prayer and intensive study and the whole house is full of bottles of pure (and expensive) holy water. Her garden – once adorned by colorful flowers – has now mutated into a dry Karesansui, Zen Garden, where she carefully rakes gravel every day, to represent ripples in water.where she carefully rakes gravel every day, to represent ripples in water.where she carefully rakes gravel every day, to represent ripples in water.

One day though, Osamu reappears; he is terminally ill and wishes – or so he declares – to spend his remaining time with his wife. Not surprisingly, Yoriko is shocked and rather disappointed to see him, but – feeling forced by this inescapable emotional blackmail – she allows him to stay in her house. His reappearance is akin to a stone thrown into the calm waters of her existence, and her whole well-built equilibrium is at risk of crumbling down. Little help comes her way from Mizuki (Hana Kino , who curiously resembles Masako Motai, a regular presence in many of Ogigami's films), a janitor she befriends at work whose down to earth and sarcastic manners give a bit of strength to Yoriko, but even Mizuki has her own share of accurately concealed troubles.
At the time of her previous movie “Riverside Mukolitta”'s release, I was happy to have the opportunity to interview director Ogigami, and on that occasion, she revealed the inspiration of Mukolitta's main plot came from a real story she had come across in a TV documentary. I wouldn't be surprised if even this film was inspired by several real-life tales of post-disaster. But regardless the truthfulness or not of my own personal speculation about the source material, “Ripples” remains an accurate and vivid observation of how we react to trauma and fear, and the way we try to stick together the pieces of a broken existence.


Water, and the symbolism that arises from its inherent qualities, like its clarity and its calm and still surface, is widely utilised in “Ripples”, in many occasions. The most apparent is linked to the cult-like religion which Yoriko is devoted to In Buddhism, water is used as a metaphor for the path to enlightenment and, just as purifying water, the Ryokumei-kai water aims to cleanse the mind of impurities, helped – of course – by generous money donations. But above all, as the devotees chant in their dancing routine, the holy water helps them to overcome fear, hence the popularity of these cult-like religions in the aftermath of tragic events. Yoriko has stashed under a dead calm surface her fear and rage for being left alone in the middle of the disaster, struggling to stay afloat as financial pressures and family misfortunes came to bear.However, this is a fragile and unstable composition, which is easily deranged by any unpredicted events.