World premiere | In Competition | ONLINE
Japan, 2025, 105’, Japanese
Directed by: Adachi Shin
Script: Adachi Shin
Photography (color): Tawara Kenta
Editing: Hirano Kazuki
Producers: Adachi Akiko, Sakai Masanori, Kugimiya Michihiro, Morita Maho
Cast: Sano Hiroki, Amano Hana, Kato Saki, Ayame Goriki, Yuka Itaya
Date of First Release in Territory: TBA
Now a successful scriptwriter with a list of credits that includes 100 Yen Love, the 2014 boxing drama that inspired the Chinese mega-hit YOLO, Adachi Shin struggled for years to find a foothold in the industry. But with the support of his wife – whose fictionalized alter ego appears in his 2019 autobiographical comedy A Beloved Wife (2019), Adachi stayed the course. The film’s scriptwriter, however, is hardly a role model: Wimpy, cringy and sex deprived, he stirs his wife to righteous wrath.
A similar dynamic is seen in the likably loose-limbed road movie Good Luck, Adachi’s latest as scriptwriter and director, though the two principals – a beginning director and a mysterious woman he meets on the road – are younger, being both around thirty. And in contrast to the high-volume theatrics of the earlier film, the new one is low key, with many of the laughs coming from wordless bits of business. Also, despite the soul-baring revelations of its main characters, tears are never shed.
The director, Yoshiyama Taro (Sano Hiroki), is invited to appear at a screening of his personal documentary at Cinema Bluebird, a landmark theater in Oita Prefecture, after it wins an honorable mention in a competition for indie films.
Before Taro leaves Tokyo, his girlfriend Yuki (Kato Saki), a level-headed type who is economically supporting him, tells him not to skip the festival party. Given the negativity he exudes like a force field, we immediately know he will.
At the screening of the film, which is about an obviously uncomfortable Yuki, the emcee smilingly tells Taro she found it uninteresting. “Why are you making films?” she asks. And he has no good answer.
Instead of crawling into a hole Taro goes out sightseeing the next day where he encounters a woman who says she was in the audience – and liked his film. Taro continues on his way and has comic encounters with the gloomy okamisan (proprietor) at his inn, who looks as though she stepped out of a J-horror movie, as well as other oddball women who discombobulate him. Returning to the inn, he again meets his fan, who is also staying there.
One thing leads to another, and Taro spends the next day with the fan, Sunahara Miki (Amano Hana). A free-spirited type with a wide-open smile, Miki takes a bewildered but grateful Taro on a whirlwind day of discoveries and adventures. They end up checking into a New Agey campground, only instead a tent Taro lodges in an ingeniously constructed tree house.
How wonderful – and how awkward when Miki, who is staying elsewhere on the site, pops in just after Taro flops down for the night.
This may make Good Luck sounds like an offbeat sex comedy, but neither Taro nor Miki makes a seductive move. Also, throughout their brief acquaintance, they have been opening up to each other, with Miki admitting that she enjoys meeting strangers on her never-ending travels, but can’t stand longer relationships. Meanwhile, Taro tells her about his lifelong passivity – and his fear that it may make him miss out on what really matters.
These confessions don’t weigh down the film: They make the characters more human and their connection more significant that two strangers swapping anecdotes. And in his script and direction, Adachi breaks free from commercial conventions in ways that surprise and amuse.
In his director’s statement, Adachi says Good Luck expresses his own “feeling of anxiety” when making a film. In other words, Taro c’est moi. But Adachi is also Taro with talent and professional credibility. Too bad Taro can’t take courage from his maker’s example.
GUEST:
ADACHI Shin, director
ADACHI Akiko, producer
Adachi Shin
After graduating from the Japan Institute of the Moving Image, Adachi Shin (b. 1972) studied under Director Somai Shinji. He began writing screenplays after working as an assistant director and in theater. In 2015, he won the 39th Japan Academy Film Prize for Best Screenplay Award for 100 Yen Love (2014). Abroad, he won the Cut Above Award for Outstanding Performance in Film at the 9th Japan Cuts (2015) and the Netpac Award (Best Asian Film Award) at the 19th Buchen International Fantastic Film Festival (2015).
FILMOGRAPHY
2016 – 14 That Night
2019 – A Beloved Wife
2023 – Brats, Be Ambitious!
2025 – Good Luck