Adabana Blu-ray

To live, he must choose to kill another self. Adabana is the second feature from Sayaka Kai, whose debut Red Snow (2019), inspired by a boy’s disappearance, attracted attention in Japan and abroad and won Best Picture at the fourteenth Japan Film Festival Los Angeles. This Japanese-French coproduction asks what beauty and value lie within a life described as an adabana, a flower that bears no fruit. By imagining a world somewhere other than here, it confronts the fears of the present.

Arata Iura plays Shinji, with actor, model and fashion-brand creator Kiko Mizuhara as clinical psychologist Mahoro. Toko Miura, acclaimed for Drive My Car, appears as the enigmatic woman by the sea; Yuki Saito plays Shinji’s mother, and actor and photographer Masatoshi Nagase also joins the film. Editors Laurent Sénéchal, nominated at the ninety-sixth Academy Awards for Anatomy of a Fall (2023), and Azusa Yamazaki of Drive My Car (2021) bring their skills together, creating a distinctive meeting of leading film talent.

Raised in a wealthy family, Shinji appears to have the life anyone could wish for: a wife, a young daughter and an ideal home. Yet a potentially fatal illness has left him recuperating in hospital. As surgery approaches, Mahoro attends to his psychological wellbeing, but he cannot sleep, has little appetite and remains consumed by anxiety.

Mahoro suggests that speaking about feelings he has kept bottled up may help his operation go well, and Shinji begins tracing his memories. He recalls the mysterious woman he met beside the sea and his mother’s words from childhood: become strong, and you will be protected. Instead of bringing relief, these memories leave him even more unsettled.

Shinji begs Mahoro to let him meet “it”: another self, outwardly identical to him, provided to a sick person for treatment. Only a privileged upper class is permitted to possess such a counterpart; those who are not chosen cannot have one at all. When Shinji finally meets his double, he becomes increasingly absorbed in this pure, intelligent being, whose appearance matches his own but whose inner life is different.

Video extras include Behind the Scenes of Adabana; footage from the October 3, 2024 completion-premiere greetings at Theatre Shinjuku; the Pavane Pour Une Infante Défunte (Reading) music video, with poetry read by Kiko Mizuhara, Toko Miura and Miyako Koda and music by akiko; and the Adabana Special Photo Movie, photographed, edited and directed by Masatoshi Nagase with music by akiko. The trailer collection contains the main trailer and special videos A and B. A specially designed sleeve case completes the presentation.