The yearning….. I think for me this movie was more about human connection than anything else. A cold person who is repressed and scared of getting hurt meets a bonfire of a human being who has no qualms with being expressive and going with the natural flow of human emotions. It’s about the risk involved with reaching out for connection and how WE get to decide what we do with the pieces of the past- we can either wither or face ourselves toward the sun. I loved how beautiful the colors were and the shots were unique and expressive. I loved the use of colors to express coldness and warmth and how coldness feels infinitely colder once you have known true warmth. Not the movie for you if you are not down for slower scenes where you sit in the emotion and bask in the atmosphere.

Even if it's "just" 1,5 hours long, it's really slow-paced. Sometimes it was the relaxing kind of slow, but mostly it was please-just-jump-to-the-next-scene slow. The characters developed feelings from literally nothing [spoiler]- they only had sex once, and then they slept once or twice at each other's houses sharing their sad backstories. Then Toga-san gave Shima a key to his apartment, then they argued as if they had any kind of relationship (it couldn't even be a "friends with benefits" status since they only slept with each other once), then when Toga-san went to Tokyo, Shima was even more depressed and lonely and a mess than before.[/spoiler] And his (Yonehara Kousuke's) poor acting just worsened this awful plot.