After the Storm (2016) Review – The Night We Passed Through Together

 

Header illustration for the film review essay of After the Storm (2016).

Illustration created for editorial movie review purposes.

What if a single night, endured together, changes nothing—and yet leaves the air somehow different?

🎥 Film Overview

Title	After the Storm (海よりもまだ深く / Umi yori mo Mada Fukaku / "Even Deeper than the Sea")
Director	Hirokazu Kore-eda
Release	May 21, 2016 (Japan); March 17, 2017 (United States, limited)
Runtime	117 minutes (1 hour 57 minutes)
Genre	Drama, Family
Screenplay	Hirokazu Kore-eda
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese
Cinematography	Yutaka Yamazaki
Music	Hanaregumi
Production Company	Fuji Television Network, Bandai Visual, AOI Pro
Distributor	GAGA Corporation (Japan); Film Movement (US)
Rating	Not Rated
Cast	Hiroshi Abe (Shinoda Ryota), Kirin Kiki (Yoshiko Shinoda), Yoko Maki (Kyoko), Taiyo Yoshizawa (Shingo), Lily Franky (Kôichirou Yamabe), Satomi Kobayashi (Chinatsu Nakajima), Sosuke Ikematsu (Kento Machida)
Box Office	$272,132 (US limited release)
Awards & Festivals	Un Certain Regard section, 2016 Cannes Film Festival
Critical Reception	7.4/10 IMDb; 96% on Rotten Tomatoes

Note: After the Storm was filmed in Kiyose, a city on the outskirts of Tokyo, in the housing complex where director Kore-eda himself grew up. He conceived of the film in 2001, after visiting his mother who had been living alone there following his father's death, and began writing the screenplay in 2013. Kirin Kiki and Hiroshi Abe previously appeared together in Kore-eda's Still Walking (2008), also playing a mother and son. The Japanese title is taken from a song by Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng; in its original context a romantic declaration, here it is repurposed to speak of family bonds that outlast both love and disappointment.

📖 Plot Summary

Ryota is a man who peaked early. Fifteen years ago he won a literary prize for his first novel. He has not written another since. Now he works as a private detective—a job he tells himself is research—spending what little he earns at the racetrack and struggling to pay child support for his eleven-year-old son, Shingo.

His father has recently died. His mother, Yoshiko, is quietly getting on with her life in the same public housing complex where Ryota grew up. His ex-wife Kyoko is raising Shingo and, it seems, beginning to move forward. Ryota is not moving forward. He is circling the past, unable to quite let it go, unable to quite return to it either.

When a typhoon bears down on the city one summer night, Ryota and his family find themselves sheltering together at Yoshiko's small apartment: mother, son, ex-wife, grandson. Food is placed on the table. Quiet words are exchanged. Outside, the storm shakes the windows. Inside, the air is strangely, unexpectedly still. Nothing is resolved that night. And yet the morning that follows is not quite the same as the one before it.

🌸 Key Themes

The Present, Which Is So Easy to Miss

Yoshiko says at one point: "I wonder why it is that men can't love the present. Either they just keep chasing whatever it is they've lost, or they keep dreaming beyond their reach." It is the film's plainest statement of its central concern—and it is given not in a climactic scene, but in passing, between bites of food, the way real wisdom tends to arrive.

Ryota is entirely oriented toward the past and the future. His past glory, his future novel, his former marriage, the father he never became. The present—Shingo in front of him, his mother's cooking on the table, this particular evening—slides by while he is looking elsewhere. The film watches him missing it, gently, without cruelty, the way a good parent might watch a child make a mistake they cannot be stopped from making.

What a Storm Does and Does Not Change

A storm does not resolve things. Ryota does not win Kyoko back. He does not suddenly become the father he imagines himself to be. He does not finish the novel. The typhoon passes, and the next morning the lottery tickets he was holding turn out to be worthless, as they almost always do.

And yet. The night spent sheltering together leaves something behind—not dramatic change, but a faint residue. A memory Ryota and Shingo now share. A moment when four people were in the same small room and the weather outside made the inside feel like its own kind of warmth. The film insists that this is not nothing. It is, in fact, quite a lot.

Imperfection as the Texture of Love

Kore-eda is not a director who punishes his characters for being flawed. Ryota gambles, lies, steals small things, disappoints people who love him. He is also genuinely tender with his son, perceptive about others even when blind to himself, and capable of moments of real grace. The film holds all of this without resolving it into a verdict.

Yoshiko's late husband was similarly imperfect—she says so plainly. And yet she loved him. And yet she grieves him. The film suggests that love does not require its object to be particularly good; it requires only that two people have shared time, passed through the same seasons, accumulated the kind of knowledge of each other that only proximity over years can create.

🎬 What Makes This Film Special

Kore-eda's Eye for the Ordinary

Few filmmakers working today watch ordinary life as closely as Hirokazu Kore-eda, or are more unfailingly generous with what they find there. His camera lingers on meals being prepared, on hands arranging food, on the specific clutter of a small apartment lived in for decades. These are not incidental details. They are the film's primary language—the way it says: this is what a life looks like from the inside, and it is worth looking at.

He shot in the housing complex where he himself grew up, and that intimacy is visible in every frame. The spaces feel inhabited rather than constructed. The light falls the way light actually falls in small apartments at the edge of a Japanese city in summer.

Kirin Kiki's Performance

If the film has a center of gravity, it is Kirin Kiki as Yoshiko. She is funny, unsentimental, perceptive, and entirely without self-pity—a woman who has lived long enough to see through illusions without becoming bitter about them. Her scenes with Hiroshi Abe have the ease of long familiarity, as indeed they should: the two played mother and son in Still Walking as well, and that history is quietly present in every exchange. Kiki, who passed away in 2018, appears in several of Kore-eda's later films; After the Storm stands as one of her finest collaborations with him.

Stillness as Cinematic Method

The film has almost no dramatic incidents in the conventional sense. There is no confrontation, no revelation, no turning point that can be easily located. What it has instead is duration—the accumulation of small moments that, taken together, amount to something true about how families work: how much goes unsaid, how much is communicated through the unremarkable rituals of sharing space and food, how the deepest feelings tend to surface not in argument but in the pauses between ordinary sentences.

🌍 Where to Watch

Streaming: MUBI (select regions), Prime Video (US, rent/purchase), Fandango at Home, Apple TV

Physical: Available on DVD and Blu-ray via Film Movement (US)

Note: Availability varies by region and may change over time. MUBI is currently the most consistent streaming source in multiple countries.

📝 Final Thoughts

After the Storm does not offer the comfort of resolution. Ryota does not become who he wanted to be. The family does not reassemble. The storm passes and the world reasserts its ordinary terms.

What the film offers instead is something quieter and, in the end, more sustaining: the sense that the nights we endure together—unremarkable nights, nights without drama, nights where food is eaten and small things are said and the wind shakes the windows—these nights settle somewhere inside us and do not entirely leave. The air is not quite the same afterward. Nothing appears dramatically different. And yet.

Kore-eda trusts that this is enough. That life lived at this register—imperfectly, among imperfect people, in ordinary rooms—already holds something worth attending to.

💭 Personal Film Reflection

On the night the typhoon passed through, four people remained in a small apartment. The wind pressed against the windows, persistent and loud. Inside, food was set down, small tasks were finished, and conversation moved quietly from one corner of the room to another.

Nothing was resolved. No promises were made. Morning would come, and each would return to their separate lives.

And yet, something of that night lingers.

Perhaps not change in any visible sense. Not reconciliation, not transformation. Only the memory of having shared the same narrow space while the storm pressed against the world outside.

There is something about passing through a difficult night together— not fixing it, not overcoming it, simply remaining.

The next day may look almost identical. But the air feels slightly altered, as if it now carries the trace of having endured something side by side.

Sometimes, that is all a family has.

폭풍은 모든 것을 바꾸지 않는다. 그러나 함께 버텨낸 밤은, 우리 안 어딘가에 조용히 남는다.

(A reflection in Korean—because some truths about the nights we survive together feel truer in the language of the heart.)

💬 Join the Conversation

Has there been a night—unremarkable from the outside, perhaps even difficult—that stayed with you longer than you expected? Is there someone in your life whose imperfections you have come to understand, over time, as simply part of the texture of who they are? Share your thoughts below.

🎬 More from Cinematic Sanctuaries

If After the Storm's quiet attention to ordinary life and the bonds that form through shared time resonated with you, these films from Cinematic Sanctuaries offer their own gentle sanctuaries:

• Still Walking (2008) – Another Kore-eda family gathering, where everything unsaid fills every room
• Our Little Sister (2015) – Building a life together from what remains, quietly and without drama
• Little Forest (2018) – The rhythm of seasons and the slow work of finding where one belongs
• Shoplifters (2018) – A family held together not by blood but by the choice to remain
• Bread and Soup and Cat Weather (2013) – Ordinary days, and the dignity they quietly carry

Each film offers a different angle on the same quiet truth: that the most important things often happen in the pauses, at the table, in the unremarkable hours we spend beside each other.

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👤 About the Author

Young Lee writes at Cinematic Sanctuaries, exploring stories where the most important things happen in the pauses—at the table, in ordinary rooms, in the hours after the storm passes.

Read more articles from this author on Cinematic Sanctuaries.