5 Must-See Films at the 2024 Tokyo International Film Festival (2025)

“The Colors Within” (dir. Naoko Yamada)

One thing that separates TIFF from other festivals of its scale is that —for obvious reasons —it can always be counted on to showcase some of the year’s splashiest and most-anticipated new anime features. The 2024 edition is no exception, as TIFF is set to highlight the latest (and possibly greatest?) film by “A Silent Voice” director Naoko Yamada, who never misses when it comes to making sweet and sensitive movies about kids who learn to express themselves through the power of music.

Yamada’s first feature at Science SARU (where she set up shop after surviving the tragic arson incident that killed 36 of her Kyoto Animation colleagues in 2019), “The Colors Within” essentially takes the whole “musicians claiming to have synesthesia” thing to vibrant new heights. It tells the story of a girl who only sees color when she looks at people — the colors represented by their inner beings.

When a blue new friend suddenly disappears, our heroine forms a band to go and find her. What happens from there is best left unspoiled, but rest assured that it’s full of some extremely arresting music, all of it more idiosyncratic and true to its characters than the anime cheese-rock you might expect to soundtrack a film like this one. Look for IndieWire’s full review of “The Colors Within” early next week.

“Lust in the Rain” (dir. Shinzo Katayama)

The most formally impressive and conceptually ambitious of the TIFF competition titles that I was able to see, Shinzo Katayama’s “Lust in the Rain” is a steamy but conflicted mind-fuck of a movie about male desire, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and the magic elixir that you can apparently extract — with the help of a giant syringe — from the hair whorls of stressed out children.

And though it takes a minute for things to get really weird, it’s immediately clear that this Yoshiharu Tsuge adaptation will make good on the surrealism of its source material, as Katayama blitzes us with a montage of monkey sex, samurai footage, and nuclear explosions before we even get to the studio logos at the start of the film.

It’s the perfect introduction to a movie about a horny young manga artist (Narita Ryo as Yoshio) who begins to confuse reality with the serio-comic rape fantasies that inspire his comics when the object of his desire — and her married con man lover — both move into his squalid kitamachi apartment (“Lust in the Rain” is set in a pseudo-allegorical alternate reality that’s divided into a Japanese “North Town” and a Chinese “South Town”).

Yoshio’s longing for the beautiful Fukuko (“Foreboding” star Eriko Nakamura, excellent as always) goes into hyper-drive when the con man flees south, and the two of them embark on an almost “Jacob’s Ladder’’-esque journey into the darkest recesses of the human psyche to find him.

It’s a journey that proves to be as volatile as Yoshio’s hormones, as Katayama careens between erotica, horror, and slapstick comedy with ever-increasing speed. One second the camera is exalting in the softness of human flesh, the next second someone’s arm is melting right off their bone. “It seems that everything I want is not mine,” Yoshio laments at one point, and this lurid and labyrinthine head-scratcher watches him chase after it like a dog trying to bite its own tail. I’m honestly not sure what to make of it, but that’s all the more reason to see how people respond to the film at the festival.

“Promise, I’ll Be Fine” (dir. Katarína Gramatová)

A rugged and remarkably well-textured coming-of-age story from the foothills of Slovakia, Katarína Gramatová’s “Promise, I’ll Be Fine” is a strong reminder that TIFF has the ambition and curatorial prowess to be so much more than a showcase for new Japanese films. This particular title wouldn’t be out of place in the World Dramatic Competition at Sundance, but it has a much better chance of standing out at a festival that isn’t so exclusively focused on its own national cinema.

Inspired by true events and predominantly cast with non-actors (the film’s palpable veneer of authenticity is inextricable from its dramatic power), Gramatová’s debut kicks off as a vibes-driven hangout movie about a pimply teen named Eňo (Michael Zachenský) who just wants to drive mopeds with his friends. The mountain villages of Banská Bystrica might not seem to offer much in the way of summer fun (at least not since the glass factory was closed down), but Eňo and his pals are happy enough to rev their engines at pretty girls, sell blueberries to motorists on the local road, and steal pizza from the village drunk. The promise of an upcoming bike race — and the prize money it offers to the winner —offers a smidge of focus to the boys’ languid summer days, but an unexpected urgency starts to settle in after Eňo crashes his moped. Forced to turn to his frequently absent mother for help, he begins to realize that his moped’s busted motor isn’t the only thing that’s keeping him stuck at home.

Hewing to the basic template of its genre, but told with such vivid characters — and such a strong sense of place —that it never seems the least bit formulaic, “Promise, I’ll Be Fine” is the rare coming-of-age story that reminds you why they never get old.

“She Taught Me Serendipity” (dir. Akiko Ohku)

Surely one of the best-titled films premiering at Tokyo (or anywhere) this year, Akiko Ohku’s “She Taught Me Serendipity” stands out from the rest of the TIFF selection for its unbelievably raw approach to modern romance. The story, adapted from a novel by the comedian Shusuke Fukutoku comic, is straightforward enough: A dorky college kid named Toru (Riku Hagiwara) develops an instant crush on the beautiful loner who sits in front of him in class (Yuumi Kawai as Hana), triggering a strange but poetic flirtation that hinges on blue umbrellas, the worst bed head of all time, and playing chicken with the sound on Toru’s TV —how loud can he listen before the sheer volume of the universe threatens to overwhelm him?

Meanwhile, the self-absorbed Toru is oblivious to the affections of the bubbly (and somewhat younger) musician who works at the local bathhouse, at least until she lays it all out for him in one of the longest and most heart-wrenching monologues you’ve ever seen.

A melodrama directed with the delicate touch of day-to-day life, “She Taught Me Serendipity” might evoke the likes of “(500) Days of Summer” by the time it reaches the sea floor of Toru’s narcissism, but the journey there is raw and wounding in a way that feels all too foreign to American cinema. Rather than end with a wink, Ohku’s film builds to a devastating revelation — the kind that will clearly sit with Toru for the rest of his life. It’s the perfect final note for a movie that, for all of its eccentricities, always remains attuned to the slowly eroding solipsism of its young hero.

“Teki Cometh” (dir. Daihachi Yoshida)

The programmers at TIFF clearly don’t shy away from strangeness, and — to the festival’s credit — that willingness to get weird is as evident in the competition line-up as it is in the ancillary sidebars. Case in point: Daihachi Yoshida’s “Teki Cometh,” a black-and-white character study about a retired college professor that effectively bridges the gap between Yasujiro Ozu and David Lynch.

A measured slow-burn that lulls you into a somnambulant state over the course of its first hour, “Teki Cometh” teases your pity — and tests your patience —as Yoshida quietly lays the groundwork for his feverish third act. We watch, over the course of several seasons, as the widowed Gisuke (Kyozo Nagatsuka) putters around his rustic Japanese-style house and counts down the days until he’ll run out of money. There aren’t all that many of them left, as writing articles about Rimbaud for the local newspaper only gets you so far in 2024.

Gisuke is sometimes visited by an attractive —and newly divorced — former student, but while he’s unfailingly polite in her presence, the death of his wife has forced him to confront the more primitive aspects of his nature. When women aren’t around, Gisuke opines about how much he relates to the protagonist of “Rear Window,” and credits French literature for teaching him to appreciate mankind’s “shameful but captivating nature.”

“Shameful but captivating” indeed, as Yoshida’s occasional interjections of nightmare imagery — highlighted by a truly haunting colonoscopy — begin to assert a greater control over the story as Gisuke’s loneliness bleeds into psychosexual torment and generalized paranoia. “The enemy is coming,” an email announces one day, but at that point Gisuke is already lost to a war with himself. Beguiling and unsparing in equal measure, “Teki Cometh” is a piece of lo-fi portraiture that leaves a lasting mark.