Kotoko (film)

A single mother, Kotoko (Cocco), struggles to care for her infant son, Daijiro, while suffering from double vision. This condition causes her to hallucinate terrifying doubles of people she meets. Kotoko regularly practices self harm, due to a fascination with her body’s will to live, and finds that her hallucinations only cease while she is singing.

Following a further episode wherein she believes she’s dropped her child off a roof, only to find him safely in her apartment, and after having a breakdown while trying to cook a meal, Kotoko’s son is taken away to be raised by her sister.

Some time later, Kotoko is permitted to visit Daijiro. She sings to herself during the bus journey over to her sister’s house. They enjoy their time together, but the trip passes quickly and Kotoko is soon back feeling despondent, alone in her apartment. While stood on the roof of her building one day, she’s approached by a man (Tsukamoto) who says he’s been following her since hearing her sing on the bus. His appearance triggers a particularly violent hallucination for Kotoko, but once she has recovered from this, he reassures her that he doesn’t mean her any harm and reveals that he’s an award-winning novelist named Seitaro Tanaka. Tanaka asks Kotoko if she’d be willing to date him and, in response, she stabs him in his right hand with a fork. This doesn’t deter him, however, though she rebuffs his advances until one night she sees him accept an award on TV. She reads his new book in its entirety soon after and agrees to go on a date with him the next time he asks, during which she stabs him in the left hand with a fork.

One night, Tanaka rushes over to Kotoko’s apartment and, when she doesn’t answer the door, he breaks in to find her in the middle of a self-harming session. In a panic, he fetches towels for her and, when she seems to have recovered, he proposes marriage to her. Kotoko refuses and forces him out of her apartment. Tanaka starts to walk home, but instinctively returns to the apartment, finding Kotoko self harming once again. When Tanaka goes to fetch more towels, Kotoko flees the apartment and, upon being chased, screams at Tanaka that she is a terrible person. He tries to reassure her that whatever she might have done in her past doesn’t matter and that she is a good person now. He then suggests they should visit her son together, which they do. During the visit, Kotoko tells her sister that she intends to be happy from now on. We then see Kotoko, joyous, back in her apartment, though it appears to be because Tanaka has let her brutally disfigure his face. She proceeds to kiss the wound on his hand followed by his still-bloody face.

Tanaka moves in with Kotoko and they continue their volatile relationship. One night, Kotoko notices that, where she’d expect to see two Tanakas, only one is present. She surmises that this is because the world is behaving the way it does when she sings. She then performs a song for Tanaka, which brings both of them to tears.

An ebullient Kotoko returns home from work one day to find a letter from her sister which says her son is being returned to her, as Kotoko is considered to finally be rehabilitated. She rushes to tell Tanaka, but can find no trace of him in her apartment. She welcomes Daijiro upon his return, but Kotoko is once again despondent and she soon hallucinates a duplicate of Daijiro. Her inability to distinguish which is her real child seemingly results in Daijiro stabbing himself in the eye with a pencil.

The severity of Kotoko’s hallucinations now increases significantly. She first sees Daijiro climbing to the roof of her building, though when she chases him up there, she sees him instead stood down on the street below, where he is hit by a speeding car. Kotoko turns around to find Daijiro now stood next to her, unharmed. Kotoko next hallucinates herself in a warzone, being shot by a soldier who then appears in her apartment and shoots Daijiro in the head. Not wanting to see any other strangers hurt her son, Kotoko decides to try and strangle him in his sleep. As she attempts this, her reality fully breaks down, presenting her a series of sculptures, the final one being that of a doll lying on a couch, with red material coming out of its head. Kotoko looks down to find another doll where her son had been, at which point she is consumed by a bright, white light.

We next see Kotoko in some form of institution, where she is only allowed to go outside to smoke. An orderly leads her outside, where it’s raining heavily. Once it becomes clear smoking won’t be possible, the orderly replaces her cigarette with an umbrella and leaves. Kotoko drops the umbrella and dances in the rain.

It’s revealed that Daijiro isn’t dead and is now a teenager, who visits his mother and tells her about his life before leaving, seemingly in good spirits.

• Cocco as Kotoko
• Shinya Tsukamoto as Seitaro Tanaka

Kotoko premiered at the 68th Venice International Film Festival where it won the Best Film award in the festival's Orizzonti section, the first Japanese film to do so.[2]

The film was picked up for distribution in the UK by Third Window Films and was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on October 8, 2012.[3]

• 映画『KOTOKO』の公式サイト
• Kotoko at IMDb
• Kotoko review at subtitledonline.com
• Review at Twitch Archived 2015-09-22 at the Wayback Machine