The Insiders

Kimura Hiei plays Shigeru in Nobody Knows. Courtesy Capri Films.

All children live with rules. Don’t make loud noises. Don’t go on the veranda. But the golden rule for a family of four little ones in Tokyo is unusual: Don’t go outside. Ever.

Their single mother, Keiko (played by Japanese media star You), is a flirt with a Minnie Mouse voice who paints the girls’ nails and frolics with her progeny like a lion cub. She’s every child’s fantasy of the unserious, playmate parent, though every grown-up knows the fantasy is a nightmare-in-waiting.

Around the dinner table in their new apartment, she goes over house rules one more time. The two boys and two girls – the youngest are gigglers and the eldest are sober, a little nervous – all agree, yet again, to live invisibly, as they have their entire lives. Only the eldest son, 12 year-old Akira (Yagira Yuya), has a birth certificate and, therefore, an identity. He runs errands and plays his part in the public lie that he is one half of a mother-and-son duo with a father working overseas. The other three – each child is born to a different, absent father – were never registered with the government. They are non-citizens and non-existent, smuggled into the apartment in suitcases.

The astonishing film Nobody Knows is loosely based on a true story. Taking liberties with real life events, Japanese writer-director Kore-eda Hirokazu (After Life) has made one of the most gutting, physically beautiful films of recent years. At once sunny and dread-laced, Nobody Knows swings between the charming details of normal childhood – close-ups of squeaking slippers and busy hands – and the hell of unnoticed abandonment.

The children of Nobody Knows, directed by Kore-eda Hirokazu

Keiko is prone to periodic absences during which Akira, wielding a wad of cash left for him, plays daddy with quiet solemnity (deservedly, Yagira won best actor at the Cannes Film Festival last year for his unadorned performance). This scenario is the crux of so much great children’s literature: cast out of the adult world, orphaned children left to their own devices experience great adventure and uncover hidden reserves of strength (The Lord of the Flies and more recently, the Lemony Snicket series). At first, Akira and his siblings relish their independence, playing video games and hoovering packaged foods. But this time, their mother's absence stretches through Christmas and New Year's, into spring. As the seasons change outside the apartment window, little happens within but the rotations of childhood.

The film is long – more than two hours – but necessarily so to convey the languid pace of life from a child’s perspective. While shooting, Kore-eda acted as observer rather than director, letting the kids play and speak without too much scripting, making way for a wonderful naturalism. Emotion is cued not with music (Kore-eda prefers the sounds of the city, doors slamming and trains rattling; his silences are noisy) but with carefully chosen close-ups of the ordinary. There is something ecstatic and truthful about childhood in Nobody Knows as it tumbles from moment to moment. Crayons scatter, kids fight and in the next breath, grow tender and protective of one another.

But still, they obey the rules. Poignantly, the eldest girl, Kyoko (Kitaura Ayu), attempts to keep up the lessons her mother left behind. Except for Akira, the children never go outside even though inside, the system is breaking down: first the electricity goes off, then the water. The pile of cash is shrinking. It is time to leave the apartment.

The children’s first steps into the city are a joyful sprint. Sunlight washes the concrete playground, but there is foreboding everywhere, as if the kids are more vulnerable seen than unseen. It is the film’s terrible paradox that the four are just as invisible in the world as sequestered from it. On the streets, they look like any other children – though their hair is getting longer, their clothing tattered – and the empowered orphan fantasy begins to rot; how is it possible that no one can see they are alone and in need of rescue? They drift through the city like supernatural entities, unrecognized except by a few with a special gift of sight. Those who do see them make inadequate gestures of humanity: a clerk at the local grocery store passes food to Akira out the back door; a rebellious middle-class girl envies the children their independence and begins to hang around out of curiosity, getting crushy with Akira. But by the time she recognizes that the now-squalid apartment is not a symbol of liberation, she is helpless to save them from tragedy.

A good horror movie sets off a creeping awfulness somewhere in the spine. Nobody Knows feels like a horror movie, but the stakes are much higher. The possibility that our heroes aren’t going to be saved dawns slowly, unfathomably; that the unsaved are children makes this simple film excruciating at times, and palpably hard to watch. Chances for rescue evaporate over and over; the entire city seems oblivious to the plight of the forgotten. Without striking the “issue movie” chord, Kore-eda takes on urban alienation, elegantly and calmly. In the story of these unnoted children is the most extreme, most terrifying version of city life. If our neighbours down the hall are unknown to us, then we are unknown to them, too. Nobody Knows shows how fragile these bonds are – citizen to citizen – that keep us, just barely, afloat.

Nobody Knows opens in Toronto and Vancouver on Feb 18, and in Montreal on March 8.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.