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‘Happy Hour is Hamaguchi’s seventh feature, and its length is entirely justified, indeed richly and deeply filled […] Hamaguchi is a genius of scene construction, turning the fierce poetry of painfully revealing and pugnaciously wounding dialogue into powerful drama that’s sustained by a seemingly spontaneous yet analytically precise visual architecture. Happy Hour is the story of a group of four middle-class women. One of the four, Jun, has been friends with each of the other three, separately, for twenty-five years, and she introduced them to one another and united them as a group more recently.

The action starts on the simplest of premises: the four friends plan to take an overnight trip together to a nearby spa town and its hot springs. But that trip doesn’t happen until midway through the film. Before they get there, Hamaguchi has sketched—or, rather, sculpted, with an exquisite filigree touch applied to the weightiest of materials—a profound interlacing of experience, joining carefully observed particulars of employment and the tautly resonant bonds of friendship with the elusive and tragic mysteries of romantic love.

Happy Hour, a work of distinctly modern cinema, reaches deep into the classic traditions of melodrama—along with its coincidences and its violent contrasts—to revive a latent power for grand-scale observation through painfully close contact with the agonizing intimacies of contemporary life.’ The New Yorker

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