IFFI 2025 | ‘Renoir’ movie review: Little weirdo’s Citypop summer of death

After averaging four films a day at IFFI, my brain was running on whatever fumes Peoples lager counted as. When the seemingly soft and harmless Renoir floated in unsuspectingly enough for me to underestimate it, this quiet little thing turned out to be the sharpest, sleeper special I’d watched all day.

Chie Hayakawa, who broke out with Plan 75 and its eerily bureaucratic euthanasia scheme, pivots from speculative future to 1987 Tokyo, during the froth of Japan’s bubble years. The premise is simple though its textures are not: eleven-year-old Fuki lives in the suburbs with a father who is slowly dying of cancer and a mother whose work and caregiving leave little energy for anything else. The film premiered in the main competition at Cannes this year before opening at IFFI, and threads its way through that specific late-’80s moment with a melange of personal memory and social observation.

Hayakawa has said the project grew out of her own childhood experience of having a sick father and that she deliberately anchored it in the boom-era years because that insulated prosperity rhymed uncomfortably with our present. You feel that double exposure almost immediately. Hospitals and cramped apartments share the frame with bright consumer surfaces, as if the country were trying to wallpaper over illness with pastel flourishes.

The opening lays out the film’s method with a small, nasty flourish. Fuki sits alone watching a VHS compilation of crying babies, tosses the tape in the trash room, encounters a stranger whose questions creep from casual to invasive. Later that night, the man appears in her bedroom and kills her. Only then does the film snap back: this is a school assignment, a story Fuki has written with the deranged title “I Want to Be an Orphan.” Her teacher is shaken (but I was in splits). Her mother, called in for an intervention, is annoyed at having her workday interrupted. The scene is funny in a way that makes your stomach clench, but it also clarifies where the emotional literacy deficit really sits in this household.

A still from ‘Renoir’
| Photo Credit:
Loaded Films

From there, Renoir settles into a loose, summer-like drift. Fuki visits her father in hospital, walks city streets that feel both familiar and slightly unreal, dials into a phone hotline for lonely adults, and fixates on a TV magician who claims telepathy is just a matter of concentration. Yui Suzuki, in her first major role, gives Fuki a stare that borders on forensic. She is the sort of (neurodivergent) child who makes adults uneasy because she actually appears to be paying attention.

The telepathy hobby is funny on the surface and devastating underneath. Fuki organises little experiments with her friend Kuriko, with the widow living upstairs, and her own father laid out in a hospital bed. Hayakawa lets the games run longer than you expect, so that they shift from cute play-acting to a more desperate, obsessive attempt to impose rules on entropy.

Hayakawa’s previous film approached mortality through policy design, and here she looks at how that same culture of avoidance trickles down into the smallest domestic gestures. Doctors soften or withhold the truth of Keiji’s condition. A fortune teller assures Utako that a possible affair with her anger-management counsellor is cosmically justified. Multiple characters push borderline scam remedies on a man who understands exactly what “miracle” means in that context and still reaches for it. And on the dating hotline, an older psychology major speaks to Fuki in a cajoling register of “kindness”.

A still from ‘Renoir’
| Photo Credit:
Loaded Films

The film’s most nerve-shredding sequence sends Fuki across town to meet this creep. Hayakawa and cinematographer Hideho Urata tilt the city slightly off its axis so that the room feels too quiet and the camera hovers a beat too long on doorways that might lead nowhere good. Nothing catastrophic happens, and the choice to step back from the worst-case outcome feels very deliberate. The danger is fully legible, but thankfully the director refuses to turn her younger self into an object lesson.

Formally, Renoir is languid to the point of irritation, and I mean that as a compliment (with a caveat). Scenes often continue well after their apparent narrative payoff and the cutting patterns feel closer to memory than to plot. The 116 minute runtime can feel longer than that if you come in with multiplex expectations of progression. But the slowness maps uncannily onto the experience the film is describing. When someone is dying by inches, days often stretch, repeat and blur; I could feel how the world moved and stayed stuck at the same time.

What keeps the film from floating away is Suzuki. She plays Fuki as a girl who is lonely but never pathetic – strange in ways that feel very precisely quirky. When she sees her father collapsed in the bathroom coughing blood, she goes into a silent emergency mode, and always knows what needs doing. Later, in voiceover, she speculates on why people grieve, how tears work and how pain travels through a room. Hayakawa keeps that voice tethered to behaviour so that the film never collapses into interior monologue.

A still from ‘Renoir’
| Photo Credit:
Loaded Films

Visually, Renoir often resembles a sun-faded postcard from a 1960s Japanese youth film. Hayakawa’s stylistic influences feel conversational with Ozu or Kore-eda, and even Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman – all those films that take children seriously as philosophers of domestic chaos.

What’s crucial is that this is not a story about Fuki “becoming” someone else. She already is someone, and this fateful summer simply reveals the contours. By the time the school year resumes and a tutor tearfully insists she knows exactly how Fuki must feel about her father’s funeral, the hug that follows feels almost laughable.

Renoir is messier and more diffuse than Plan 75, and I suspect some may bounce off its whisper-level dramaturgy. But it recognises that some children already live with their eyes open, cataloguing the surreal, the dangerous, the beautiful, and the irresponsible with the same steady curiosity. Hayakawa honours and trusts that gaze, and I do too.

Renoir was screened at the ongoing 56th International Film Festival of India in Goa

Published – November 26, 2025 07:42 pm IST