Director Lee Sang-il's epic film 'Kokuho' has become a remarkable phenomenon in Japan, drawing over 12 million viewers since its June release and earning the distinction of being the second-highest-grossing live-action film in Japanese cinema history. The three-hour drama about two kabuki actors locked in lifelong rivalry has also secured Japan's official submission to the Academy Awards, yet despite its stunning visual achievements, the film struggles with significant storytelling weaknesses.
The movie explores the compelling theme of artistic pursuit and sacrifice that has captivated audiences since cinema's early days. From classics like 'A Star is Born' (1937) and 'The Red Shoes' (1948) to modern works such as 'Whiplash' (2014) and 'The Brutalist' (2024), these stories continue to find audiences because viewers are drawn to characters who burn bright in their dedication to art. 'Kokuho,' which translates to 'national treasure' - the title given by the Japanese government to masters of traditional arts - attempts to join this tradition.
At a press conference held at CGV Yongsan in Seoul on Thursday, Lee Sang-il expressed genuine amazement at his film's success. 'From the first week through the fifth week, attendance kept climbing,' he explained. 'Young people spread the word on social media, but older viewers told each other face-to-face. Some people said they hadn't been to a theater in 20 years, but they made the trip for this one.'
The story follows Kikuo, played as a teenager by Soya Kurokawa and as an adult by Ryo Yoshizawa, the son of a Nagasaki yakuza boss who witnesses his father's brutal murder in 1964. After a failed revenge attempt, the boy is taken under the wing of Hanjiro Hanai, portrayed by Ken Watanabe, who is Osaka's preeminent kabuki actor. At Hanai's theater, Kikuo meets Shunsuke, played by Ryusei Yokohama, who is Hanjiro's son and was born into kabuki's hereditary bloodlines.
In the traditional kabuki world, sons inherit their father's stage name and position, creating a closed system where family lineage determines everything and outsiders rarely break through. Both young men specialize as onnagata, the male actors who play female roles in kabuki's all-male tradition. What begins as brotherhood gradually transforms into lifelong rivalry as both men chase the same impossible standard of greatness across five decades.
Lee Sang-il, a Zainichi Korean director who has lived his entire life in Japan, drew from his own experience as an outsider when approaching the material. 'The structure of the film - bloodline versus outsider - overlaps with elements I've carried since birth,' he explained. 'I hope Korean audiences might feel that connection more deeply than viewers elsewhere.'
As a visual spectacle, 'Kokuho' undeniably delivers on its grand ambitions. Cinematographer Sofian El Fani captures the kabuki performances with breathtaking skill, showcasing the elaborate costumes, ornate sets, and heavily stylized makeup that transforms actors' faces into living masks. The film provides helpful title cards with plot descriptions for each performance, making this specialized art form accessible to viewers unfamiliar with kabuki conventions.
Lee shoots these performance sequences in extended takes, using tight close-ups that linger on the actors' painted faces and wide shots that capture the full sweep of the stage. The acting itself is almost uncanny in its vitality, with Yoshizawa and Yokohama embodying the onnagata's stylized gestures and falsetto vocals with spellbinding conviction. They master the delicate hand movements, mincing steps, and highly controlled vocal registers despite having no professional background in kabuki.
According to the director, both actors spent months training to deliver authentic stage performances. 'They understood that if they couldn't pull off the kabuki convincingly, the whole film would collapse,' Lee said. 'But I also told them that just nailing the technical aspects wasn't enough - they had to bring out what their characters were feeling inside.'
Lee spoke extensively about a particular sequence where Kikuo performs in 'The Love Suicides at Sonezaki,' a classic Chikamatsu play about doomed lovers who choose death over separation. 'When we captured that scene in close-up, I finally understood what I'd been trying to show with this film. It wasn't just about kabuki - it was about what these performers carry inside them.'
However, the magnificent visual feast accounts for only about a quarter of the movie's three-hour runtime. Despite its exceptional length and sprawling timeframe that jumps from 1964 to the early 1970s, then to the '80s and '90s, and finally to 2014, the film feels hollow rather than epic. It becomes a scaffolding for a drama that remains in search of its characters.
Like a kabuki play itself, 'Kokuho' functions as a screenplay-driven movie where characters become vessels moving through predetermined scenes. They hit their marks with precision but never quite become actual people. Even the formidable work of the cast can only give these abstractions a moment-to-moment semblance of real life. The stunning performances become glittering distractions - essentially kabuki makeup that obscures what the movie claims to focus on but perpetually avoids: character development with genuine humanity.
The film makes clear its intention to show that Kikuo and Shunsuke serve as artistic inspirations to each other, subjects of envy, and even doubles. However, these connections are merely suggested rather than explored in depth. Curiously, the two rivals spend substantial time together across different stages of their lives, yet they hardly ever get to know each other as people. When they reconnect after years apart, their first conversation isn't about their lives but about performance: 'When are you coming back to the stage?'
In fact, no human relationship in the film - whether between rivals, master and pupil, or lovers - explores genuine connections or differences beyond increasingly repetitive philosophical statements about devotion to art and the eternal tension between inherited privilege and hard-won genius. Their temperamental differences are sketched briefly in the first act, with Shunsuke appearing more cocky and flamboyant while Kikuo seems more reserved and serious. But that's where character development ends before both disappear into the film's broader theme of artistic passion.
Lee piles on dramatic shifts across these sprawling eras, aiming for something almost mythological in their reversals of fortune and abrupt swings from stardom to obscurity and back again. But these plot points feel contrived and disjointed in their rise-and-fall structure. Each chapter plays as if it exists in a parallel universe with different versions of the characters, rather than representing organic progression from the previous section. The film compounds these issues by resorting to embarrassing melodrama near the end.
These problems point to a larger structural failure that ultimately undermines the film's grandiose ambitions. The characters don't discuss their daily routines, love lives, or interests - anything that exists outside kabuki's insular world. Even their performances, shown at great length with breathtaking cinematography, connect only to abstract ideas about sacrifice and ambition rather than heartfelt portrayals of human beings with relatable stakes.
There's another glaring omission in a film ostensibly about men who have devoted their lives to portraying women: the absence of actual women with agency. While multiple women pass through Kikuo's life - mainly as lovers, caretakers, or silent witnesses - they are portrayed without any voice or independence. They follow him with blind devotion only to disappear abruptly, without interior lives or personal motivations.
Even Harue, played by Mitsuki Takahata and introduced as Kikuo's childhood lover, goes as far as getting a yakuza-style tattoo to match his, yet she meekly trails him before quietly departing to marry his equally devastated rival. The other women shown throughout Kikuo's life exist only as background figures, victimized by one man's all-consuming ambition and present solely to be amazed by his performances. This choice is particularly problematic given kabuki's deeply sexist roots - women were forbidden from performing kabuki in the 17th century, and ever since, men have taken up the work of embodying exaggerated, stylized versions of femininity on stage.
When asked about art's meaning to him personally, Lee grew reflective during the press conference. 'I work in this industry, so of course I feel jealousy and negativity sometimes,' he admitted. 'But when I see something truly beautiful, something that genuinely moves me, all those darker feelings get purified. That's what art does - it cleanses anger and negativity. That's what I want to keep making.'
While it's a noble sentiment, almost heroic in its idealism, the film's failure to present the humanity of its characters makes it difficult for viewers to experience that promised catharsis. For a movie about characters with supposedly otherworldly circuits of thought, the storytelling feels surprisingly conventional, even melodramatic, particularly given its three-hour runtime.
Lee noted the film's particular success with older Japanese viewers who hadn't visited theaters in decades. 'They said the visual beauty and the sound design made three hours fly by, that they felt something at the cinema they'd never get at home.' Perhaps that observation captures 'Kokuho' perfectly: a magnificent contraption that looks stunning on the big screen but leaves viewers empty the moment the lights come up.
'Kokuho' is scheduled to open in Korean theaters on November 19.
