Popular reviews

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  Review by Jonathan White ★★★★★ 27

  TIFF 2015 – Film #20

  Reason for pick – interesting premise as spotted in the TIFF description.

  More akin to a tone poem or a Haiku than a narrative driven film, The Whispering Star gently glides along drawing its audience into the life of A.I. Yoko Suzuki, machine ID 722, a robot delivery woman who brings parcels to the dwindling human population, now scattered amongst the stars. A.I.'s now vastly outnumber humankind.

  With a lineage that could be traced to Le Quattro Volte, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, The Turin Horse, and The Strange Little Cat, Battlestar Galactica and A.I., director Shion Sono constructs world where there is nothing but time; ‘It’s acceptable for packages to be…

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  Review by Lise ★★★★★ 23

  tiff 2015 film 22

  A cyborg Jeanne Dielman-type delivery person travels for 10 years in a dysfunctional Hal-controlled spaceship that looks like a Japanese trailer to planets that all look like tsunami ravaged and nuclear disaster site Fukushima to deliver parcels.

  It is the most original and the most beautiful film I've seen in a very long time.

  Extremely slow paced, every minute of the film is detailed and important.
  Every encounter with the desolate planets is rich and textured and extremely poignant.
  I saw it as the story of Fukushima: the story of the dead and the story of the survivors.
  The survivors who left with nothing but the single most important item they could save.
  The survivors who…

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  Review by TonyCharles90 17

  I'll be honest, Sion Sono is one of the few directors that I'm completely incapable of reviewing objectively. Each of his movies manage to appeal to every single one of my cinematic interests and preferences; both thematically and stylistically. So if you're looking for a totally unbiased opinion about a Sono flick, I'm probably not the dude for you. The Whispering Star is no exception. With that said, this is easily the biggest departure from Sono's previous directorial efforts. Long gone is Sono's penchant for frenetic montage and shrewdly applied bubble gum-color palettes(...both qualities I love about Sono's films, in all honesty), instead leaving us with a beautifully rich tapestry of melancholy and an android's quest to find out what…

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★

  Action! - Love, Lust And Violence: Sion Sono's Inland Empire W/ The Night Nutter, Joe Mighty Castillo, The Other Guys.... and Jeff

  タルコフスキーはそこで一瞬、日本人として蘇った。

  Sion Sono gives up his depraved side for the more experimental and, to some extent, contemplative side in a film that straddles the delicate line between Solaris and Stalker, sans the magic and poetry.

  It is a purely visual narrative in which one must in many ways make up what the story is about. While the plot is not exactly game-changing and its perspective of society and nature is hardly original, the way Sono manages to convey it through the many settings or scenes is at times interesting. The way he manipulates the lighting, in particular, and…

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  Review by 20oldboy03 ★★★ 4

  English Version below

  
  DuBFal-Sci-Fi-Weeks - 2nd Round - Film Nr.14

  
  Filme, Regisseure und ihre Werke, mancherorts Schauspieler – um im Kosmos des Filmes zu bleiben – können inspirieren. Können Empfindungen in einem erwecken. Solche Empfindungen, die einem nicht einmal selbst bewusst waren. Vielleicht ein vages Aufflackern im Hinterkopf sind. Auch ein unterdrücktes Verlangen wie eine versucht zu verdrängende Pflicht. Inspirieren aus der plötzlich über einen kommenden Inspirationsquelle die währt. Ob für wenige Minuten, für eine Stunde und fallend zur zweiten, häufiger über Tage, wehrt das Tun, der damit einhergehende Schaffensprozess eben eines erst angekurbelt werden müssenden Prozesses einer Vorbereitung wie das Positionieren der Finger an der Starlinie, die Füße im Startblock eine unbestimmte, sehr wechselhafte Dauer.

  Fünfzehn Minuten und fortlaufend…

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  Review by YI JIAN ★★★½

  The sudden burst of loneliness that comes after the realization that we are standing amidst billions of planets and galaxies -- encapsulated into film. All these personal memoirs, souvenirs, belongings, how insignificant they are when compared to the larger scale of time and space. In the future, humans are frozen in time. They wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, while contemplating, always longing for nothing but the past. In this world, only the emotionless are allowed to progress forward, perhaps the parcels delivered by Yoko are supposed to indicate a wake-up call? You can almost feel the emptiness of human sentiment just from the ridiculous size difference between the shoe box, and the mere photograph lying inside; how pathetic we are, from the eyes of a machine, yet Yoko, like Wall- E, she's slowly, very slowly, starting to learn.

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  Review by R. Duval ★★★★★

  Imagine Kubrick directing something like "Eraserhead meets Stalker" and you get Shion Sono's The Whispering Star.

  Machines have taken over the galaxy. Humans are now scarce and wander throughout space, usually taking refuge on abandoned planets. The film follows a cyborg who delivers packages to them.

  It's a minimalist film. The black and white and absence of outer sounds emphasize that. During 90% of the movie, the only sound you can hear (other than the cyborg's and its spaceship AI's voice) is whatever she's doing. Cleaning, opening a faucet, breaking things.

  The landing planets the cyborg visits are actually modern day Fukushima and the humans she meets there are not actors; they're people that live on the area. Deserted, decadent,…

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  Review by Asjad ★★★★★ 4

  This is quite possibly one of the best film viewing experience of my life.

  Sion Sono proves that he is capable to make something more than a crazy twisted ride by stripping down his usual elements to make this poignant and meditative look at a world long lost through the perspective of an android trying to comprehend human nature.

  This is a minimalist film. There is no over the top violence. There are no characters screaming. The sharp sound design is limited to whispers and the surroundings that are full with ordinary objects clanging together.

  This is about how experiences shape us into the people we are.
  Quiet and meditative
  Sparks of hope in a bleak world

  This just might be Sion Sono's greatest cinematic achievement

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  Review by IdlyBlue ★★★★½

  Overall Rating: Excellent

  It feels so strange watching this, while knowing it's a Sion Sono film. It's probably his most odd, obscure and experimental film yet, which is saying a lot due to his vast filmography. Aside from it being his most avant-garde film, it's also one of his best looking films, with it's beautiful lonely framing, melancholic monochrome, still shots, and stunning set pieces. It's isolated sound design is immersive, soothing and unnerving. The Whispering Star feels like a strange mix of Sono, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Tarr, and Kojima. It's a reflective perspective of time, humanity, scientific advancement, and life within this amazing, horrifying, and unknown universe.

  "Mankind went on to make devastating mistakes. With fewer humans, space became peaceful. Machines dominate and 80% of the population are robots with AI. Humans are now an endangered species in the universe. While science has progressed, humans barely live to 100. Human existence is just the flicker of a candle flame."

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  Review by London ★★★★★

  Director: Sion Sono Ranked

  So I haven't seen Jeanne Dielman yet, but I have heard this kind of feels a lot like it. I sure hope so because this was a masterpiece. An incredibly patient journey, somewhat like I Am Keiko set in space and many different planets. Also, before anything even really happened in the film, I was blown away by how much I liked the visual design of everything. A lot of the ship, the nonhouse part, was very reminiscent of early Sci-Fi, with cords running everywhere and big goofy looking doors. Even the way the knobs and levers move from rhe ships command remind me of 50's Sci-Fi and I loved that part so much.

  Sion Sono…

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  Review by dani ★★★★★ 2

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Sion Sono's Stalker about Jeanne Dielman who goes through her daily routine not because she is a rerpessed woman but an android-deliverywoman. For 10 years she has been doing her routine without questioning why is she doing all of this or why she's alive at large, but after her first encounter with a human being she is starting to knit, she is smoking, she's looking at stars, she's wondering what she's delivering and doesn't understand "why people want delivery that takes this amount of time" [about 10 years], she's no longer spends her days on the spaceship mindlessly doing what she was programmed to do. After her second encounter she's repairing her player, she's drinking water because the man she…

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  Review by Gozu ★★★★ 3

  Sion Sono kann also auch Arthouse. Und Sci-Fi. Alles in schwarz-weiß. Alles zum Niederknien. The Whispering Star sieht von Anfang bis Ende absolut großartig aus. Leider hat mich der Film im Mittelteil nicht abgeholt und ich war eine Zeit lang nicht involviert. Keine Ahnung warum. Im Großen und Ganzen war er richtig stark. Ich werde diesen doch sehr ungewöhnlichen Sono wohl nochmal gucken müssen.

  
  Trailer: youtu.be/KGVDrhKLmcQ