Like Father, Like Son (2013) Review – A Second Life, and the Answer at the End of a Long Corridor
Header illustration for the film review essay of Like Father, Like Son (2013).
Illustration created for editorial movie review purposes.
π Short Personal Reflection
Like Father, Like Son (2013) made me think that becoming a parent is, in some ways, the beginning of a second life. A life heavier than the one I carried alone. A life that sometimes asks me to set parts of myself aside. This film poses one of the most unforgiving questions along that path: what would you do if the child you had raised for six years was not your biological child? Faced with that impossible crossroads, I found myself holding my breath — lost between two immense currents, unable to move. And long after the film ended, I was still standing there, asking a question the film refuses to answer for me.
π₯ Film Overview
| Director | Hirokazu Kore-eda |
| Release | September 28, 2013 (Japan); World Premiere May 18, 2013 (Cannes Film Festival) |
| Runtime | 120 minutes |
| Cast | Masaharu Fukuyama (Ryota Nonomiya), Machiko Ono (Midori Nonomiya), Lily Franky (Yudai Saiki), Yoko Maki (Yukari Saiki), Keita Ninomiya (Keita) |
π Story Summary
In the Japanese family drama Like Father, Like Son (2013), written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, Ryota Nonomiya is a driven architect who has built his life on discipline, achievement, and the quiet certainty that hard work produces the right outcomes. He and his wife Midori have a six-year-old son, Keita — gentle, earnest, and perhaps not quite the son Ryota had imagined. Then a phone call from the hospital changes everything: Keita is not their biological child. Two boys were switched at birth.
The other family — the Saikis — are the Nonomiyas' opposite in almost every way. Yudai Saiki is warm, unhurried, and perpetually chaotic; their home is loud and full of life. Their biological son, Ryusei, is everything Keita is not: boisterous, confident, instantly loveable. As the two families begin the slow, painful process of deciding what to do, Ryota is forced to confront a question he had never thought to ask: has he actually been a father, all these years?
Like Father, Like Son won the Jury Prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where it received a ten-minute standing ovation following its premiere.
πΈ Key Themes
Blood or Time: The Question the Film Refuses to Answer
The film presents its central dilemma with rare intellectual honesty — it does not tell you what the right answer is. Ryota's initial instinct leans toward blood: biology, lineage, the certainty of genetics. But Midori's devotion to Keita, and Ryota's own gradually deepening attachment to Ryusei, begin to complicate that certainty. And the children — who simply want to be loved, and have no interest in the philosophical debate happening above their heads — quietly undo every argument the adults construct.
Kore-eda's genius is in refusing to resolve the tension tidily. Even the eventual choices made feel less like answers than like the best available approximation of love under impossible circumstances. The film sits with the question rather than answering it, which is precisely why it stays.
What Fatherhood Actually Is
Ryota is a father in every structural sense — provider, protector, presence. But the film gently, relentlessly asks whether presence alone constitutes fatherhood. The contrast with Yudai Saiki is deliberate: where Ryota is composed and aspirational, Yudai is messy and immediate. He flies kites, makes noise, rolls around on the floor. The children gravitate toward him without hesitation.
The discovery that he is not Keita's biological father is, paradoxically, the thing that finally begins to make Ryota a real one. It forces him out of the abstract — out of achievement and expectation — and into the particular: this child, this morning, this moment. The film suggests that fatherhood is not something you are by blood, but something you become, slowly, through accumulated presence.
Class, Aspiration, and What We Pass On
The two families represent more than just different temperaments — they represent different relationships to aspiration and control. The Nonomiya household is elegant and slightly airless. The Saiki household is chaotic and alive. Kore-eda observes both without judgment, but the film's sympathies are clear: warmth outlasts order, and joy outlasts ambition, in the hearts of children.
There is a scene in which both families pose for a photograph together. One side is laughing and irreverent; the other is composed and still. In a single image, the film captures everything it has been building toward — the gap between the life Ryota has designed and the life that actually holds love inside it.
π¬ What Makes This Film Special
Kore-eda at His Most Precise
Few directors working anywhere in the world handle family drama with the combination of intelligence and restraint that Hirokazu Kore-eda brings to Like Father, Like Son. His approach here feels especially austere — stripped of ornamentation, relying almost entirely on performance and the accumulation of small, true details. A child chewing a straw the same way his biological father does. A father discovering, in a series of photographs his son has secretly taken, how his son actually sees him. These moments are not explained. They are simply allowed to exist, and they are devastating.
Kore-eda has spoken of his ongoing preoccupation with what constitutes a family — and Like Father, Like Son is perhaps his clearest statement of that question. It asks whether family is biology or choice, and answers: it is neither. It is time. It is the slow, unspectacular accumulation of days lived alongside another person.
Performance: Fukuyama and the Children
Masaharu Fukuyama gives a controlled, internally complex performance as Ryota — a man whose emotional range is narrow by design, and whose gradual opening is all the more affecting for how little of it is made visible. The film's most precise choice may be the way Kore-eda refuses to give Ryota a cathartic moment: his transformation is quiet, incremental, and therefore entirely believable.
The child actors, as in all of Kore-eda's films, are extraordinary. Keita Ninomiya as Keita is heartbreaking in his earnestness — a boy quietly reshaping himself to meet his father's expectations, never quite succeeding, never quite giving up. The film's emotional core lives in his face.
The score is sparse, built primarily around piano — present mostly in the spaces between scenes, evoking the particular silence of families who love each other and cannot quite find the words.
π Where to Watch
Streaming: Netflix (select regions), AMC+ (US)
Also available for rent/purchase: Prime Video, Apple TV
Note: Availability varies by region and may change over time. Please check current listings in your area.
π Final Thoughts
Beneath its family drama surface, Like Father, Like Son quietly asks a deeper question: what does it mean to become a parent — not by circumstance, but by choice, and by time?
Like Father, Like Son does not offer the comfort of a clear answer. What it offers instead is something rarer: the recognition that the very act of asking — of standing at the crossroads, unsure, still trying — is already its own form of becoming. Ryota does not arrive at fatherhood through a revelation. He arrives through the slow, unglamorous work of showing up, reconsidering, and choosing again.
More than a decade after its Cannes premiere, Like Father, Like Son remains one of Hirokazu Kore-eda's most emotionally precise achievements — and one of the most honest films ever made about what it costs, and what it means, to truly become a parent.
⭐ Who Will Appreciate This Film
For those who have loved a child so long that the question of blood feels almost beside the point — and who have also, in quieter moments, wondered whether they have truly been present for that love. Perfect for a still evening when you are ready to sit with a question that has no comfortable answer. Recommended for viewers who loved After the Storm (2016) or Shoplifters (2018) — films where Kore-eda asks what family really means, and trusts the audience to carry the answer home. If that kind of quiet, unresolvable truth is what you're looking for, Like Father, Like Son will stay with you long after the credits end.
π Personal Note
As I thought of my own two daughters, the countless mornings and nights we have shared came rushing back — their laughter, their tears, the long storms of adolescence we endured together. I found myself asking the same question the film leaves unanswered: what would I have done, standing at that same crossroads?
I do not have a clean answer. I am not sure the film wants me to. What I do have, after watching Like Father, Like Son, is a sharper sense of what I am actually building, day by day — not a bloodline, but a history. Not inheritance, but presence. Perhaps what makes this second life as a parent so precious is not something as instinctive as blood, but the quiet, accumulated weight of time: meals shared, nights endured, days lived side by side. The choices remain difficult. The heart continues to waver. And yet — perhaps the very act of questioning is already proof that we are becoming parents, in the only way we can.
λΆλͺ¨κ° λλ€λ 건, νΌλ³΄λ€ ν¨κ»ν μκ°μΌλ‘ μμ¬κ°λ 무μΈκ°μΈμ§λ λͺ¨λ₯Έλ€.
(A reflection in Korean — because some truths about what it means to become a parent feel truer in the language of the heart.)
π¬ Join the Conversation
If you found yourself in Ryota's position — knowing both children, having loved one for six years — what do you think you would have chosen?
Is there a moment from your own experience as a parent or child when you understood that love is built, not given — that it accumulates, rather than simply exists?
What does the word "family" mean to you — and has a film ever changed how you understood it?
π¬ More from Cinematic Sanctuaries
If Like Father, Like Son's quietly devastating portrait of parenthood, time, and what we owe the children we love resonated with you, these films offer their own gentle sanctuaries:
- After the Storm (2016) – Kore-eda's tender study of a father failing his family in small, recognizable ways — and one long night that offers something like grace
- Shoplifters (2018) – His Palme d'Or winner: a chosen family held together by necessity and love, asking what makes a bond real
- Our Season (2023) – A Korean film about the things left unsaid between a mother and daughter, and the time that runs out before we say them
- Still Walking (2008) – A single summer day with a family that cannot quite hold itself together, observed with Kore-eda's characteristic stillness
- Moonrise Kingdom (2012) – A film that understands what childhood feels like from the inside, and how differently adults read the same moments
Each of these films knows what Like Father, Like Son knows: that the people who shape us most are rarely the ones we expected — and that love, built slowly over time, is the heaviest and most enduring thing we carry.
π€ About the Author
Young Lee writes at Cinematic Sanctuaries, exploring stories where the weight of ordinary days turns out to be the most important thing we were carrying all along.
Read more articles from this author on Cinematic Sanctuaries.
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