About

‘Masahiro Motoki plays Sachio Kinugasa, an arrogant celebrity author whose loveless marriage to Natsuko has degenerated into frosty mutual tolerance. At the very moment when Natsuko dies in a bus crash, Sachio is in bed with his mistress. Meanwhile, truck driver Yoichi Omiya also loses his wife Yuki in the same crash. The two women were friends, drawing their bereaved husbands together. Consumed by guilt and self-loathing, Sachio recognizes Yoichi's grief as much more heartfelt than his own, especially as the impoverished blue-collar driver is suddenly struggling to raise two young children alone.

When the upheaval of losing his mother looks likely to ruin the upcoming school test results of Yoichi's son Shinpei, the childless Sachio impulsively offers to help. He becomes a regular presence at the Omiya family apartment, surprising himself with his latent fatherly feelings towards Shinpei.

The main dramatic engine of The Long Excuse is Sachio's enforced reassessment of his selfish lifestyle, but Nishikawa is too shrewd a storyteller to indulge us with facile redemption fantasies. Although these wounded widowers both grow as people, their journey entails some bitter lessons in class snobbery, unspoken jealousy and the searing cruelty of a child wishing his own father dead. The story retains its novelistic texture throughout, depicting even life-changing tragedies as complex and the people involved as contradictory, their shattered lives rebuilt via painstaking self-examination rather than blinding epiphany.’ The Hollywood Reporter

Ages 15+