To the Ends of the Earth

2019 ‘旅のおわり、世界のはじまり’ Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

A young Japanese woman named Yoko finds her cautious and insular nature tested when she travels to Uzbekistan to shoot the latest episode of her travel variety show.

Atsuko Maeda Shota Sometani Tokio Emoto Ryô Kase Adiz Radjabov

Alternative Titles

Tabi no Owari, Sekai no Hajimari, O Fim da Viagem, O Começo de Tudo, 在世界盡頭開始旅行

drama

120 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★ 3

I adore those Kiyoshi Kurosawa movies that despite not being proper genre films draw on his horror background for their aesthetic strategies. To the Ends of the Earth is about, like most horror movies to some extant, the unknown and everything about it is about how Maeda negotiates with a world outside her own. It starts a standard sense of alienation and director and actress combine to push it in so many directions. To the Ends of the Earth has a lot in common with Kurosawa and Maeda first film in a foreign land, The Seventh Code, but that film was more overt in how it was using fiction to modulate her relationship to that strange space. The entire sequence that goes from the chjase to the phone call is as good as the best stuff Kurosawa has ever done and everything else is equally compelling. The earth tembles here.
Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★

Perhaps slight to some - and perhaps that is dependant on how much you find yourself relating to the protagonist, Yoko - it's nevertheless undeniable to me that this is basically a total, genre-shapeshifting masterclass in modern narrative direction, perhaps surprising to some given K. Kurosawa's reputation as a great classicalist. That hasn't really changed here, but what's most impressive is that the film is a series of "non-events" - virtually nothing actually "happens" in this movie. In the meantime, Kurosawa takes all the techniques he's mastered in his genre work and applies them to everyday anxieties, and it's this mastery of technique which brings me to one of the things I admire most about his films - you're never…
Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's To the Ends of the Earth isn't a horror film but it feels like one. It's about a woman in an unsafe place, stuck in a country she doesn't understand. There's a creeping sense of being unwanted, as if being in a crowd is the loneliest thing ever. The atmosphere of To the Ends of the Earth is therefore oppressive.
What To the Ends of the Earth manages to do so well is undermine our own perceptions. It is openly about reality TV and the fact that it's all a presentation. The way the cinematography alternates between being televisual and cinematic also emphasises this. The lead character is also a performer - singing, presenting, masking herself. Yet despite…
Review by Arthur Tuoto ★★★★½

Apesar deste novo filme de Kiyoshi Kurosawa não possuir um tom sobrenatural explícito, fica evidente que, ao longo história, existe uma mística implícita na trajetória da protagonista.
Na medida em que Yoko, a personagem de Atsuko Maeda, vai passando por diversas provações ao longo da sua viagem no Uzbequistão, na medida em que ela vai absorvendo um sofrimento emocional durante esse trajeto, ela também passa a construir uma nova relação intuitiva com o espaço ao seu redor.
Existe uma jornada mística bastante clara nesse sentido. Uma jornada que começa com um sofrimento pontuado por diferentes situações de incômodo durante o seu trabalho como jornalista, passa por uma literal perseguição por agentes da lei e culmina em sutis novos estados de…
Review by yush

reconfigures kiyoshi's familiar ideas of negative space embodying an alien, antagonistic nature and stresses it as only the fault of our protagonist and no one else, much less the foreign faces that crowd the frame. while this is mostly an enthralling character study, it's also reminiscent of the wind will carry us in that it's both a beautifully composed travelogue of its own and a subtle investigation of what such a travelogue really implies.
Review by Diogo Serafim ★★★★½ 1

Okku, the free goat, not eaten by wild dogs at last. The beauty and dangers of the sea, the myth of the sky, the emotions of a song that leaves the theater and arrives at the mountains. God brings together those who love each other.
There is a scene in Sang-soo’s ‘In Another Country’ where Huppert talks to a goat using his language. They don’t really speak the same language, but they talked to each other either way. Freedom lies beyond denotation.
Crítica em português no meu blog.
Review by Evan Morgan ★★★★½ 1

Part of InRO’s first round-up for TIFF 2019:
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been here before. Not to Uzbekistan, where his newest film is set — and which is indeed new territory, geographically speaking — but to this border zone openly contested by opposing modes, genres, and moods. To the Ends of the Earth begins as a kind of travel film, or more precisely, as a document of a TV crew failing to produce one: The host, Yoko (Japanese pop singer Atsuko Maeda, now a regular Kurosawa collaborator), can’t muster the pep required to perform her role as world ambassador for audiences back home, who are conditioned to believe that foreign lands uniformly provoke wonderment and irrepressible perkiness, when in fact disappointment…
Review by Lawrence Garcia ★★★★

Had the pleasure of interviewing Kurosawa over at MUBI Notebook. As Evan Morgan has before noted, Kurosawa is one of only a few working directors who would absolutely flourish in a classic studio system, and the fact that he considers himself "not so much as an artist, but... an artisan" (a fairly astonishing statement from such an accomplished director) seems to bear out that observation. All-too-brief introduction excerpted below:
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth is a masterful film—all the more so for being masterful in the most unassuming of ways. The film originated as a commission to commemorate diplomatic relations between Japan and Uzbekistan, and to that end, it incorporates a number of the landlocked nation's various…
Review by migblah

Las películas de Kiyoshi Kurosawa son siempre sutiles y minuciosos ejercicios de suspense. Una realidad que siempre comienza siendo incomprensible en la que vamos navegando poco a poco, de la mano de uno de los mejores fabuladores del cine reciente. Kurosawa revela poco a poco su mundo, a partir de hechos anecdóticos, de fuerzas extrañas que dislocan sus relatos, que descubren no sólo misterios de la trama, sino de los lugares, de los hombres y mujeres que protagonizan sus películas. Es un cine traumático, a medio camino entre el cine de género fantástico y de terror y un cine existencialista. Cosas no necesariamente contradictorias, pero que en el caso de este cineasta japonés, siempre consigue que sus historias de fantasmas,…
Review by Sam C. Mac ★★★★

Since Yoko herself doesn’t speak the language, Kurosawa chooses not to subtitle the Uzbek dialogue spoken throughout To the Ends of the Earth, and this decision, combined with the use of a filmic grammar that often feels ported over from the director’s horror films (dramatic lighting, wide frames that emphasize an individual’s feelings of alienation, and eerie silences), serves to envelop us in the psychological space of a young woman whose emotional engagement with a foreign culture, as well as her careerist ambitions and her ability to be open with those around her, are subject to ingrained fears and anxieties.
Review for Slant Magazine.
Review by Julius Banzon ★★★★

Perfectly poised set-pieces. An introvert's travel guide. Seventh Code flipped the standard of the value of "courage" on its head in a thematic remake of The Seventh Victim, but this film heaps indignities and humiliations not as either admonitions or paths to growth, but as a paring down of the world and our place in it to its barest essential: we are always strangers in our own land. (Meanwhile, love is always a red herring consistently in Kurosawa's 2010s films, an ideal that doesn't exist.) It's good Kurosawa remains so confident and unflappable, because this film could very well have "oversold" its story to reflect the flightiness and insecurity of its main character, but Kurosawa's narrative construction remains as modal…
Review by Eduardo Valente

Such freedom and "don't-give-a-fuckness", as usual with Kyioshi. Always keeps you guessing about where it's going, without ever making an effort. It's just how he flows, I guess.
In a way, it's as if "Lost in Translation" had its "Letters from Iwo Jima" version - except that by a Japanese filmmaker of course, which makes all the difference.
The fantastic in Kyioshi always comes from within, and his non-genre works make it as clear as possible. The depths of the human soul, the difficulties in sharing a world with others while each one inhabit their own personal universe. And have I mentioned the freedom?

Recent reviews

Review by jonnywhy ★★½

Like most Kurosawa films (with the exception of Cure and probably Tokyo Sonata), there's more of an appreciation than an enjoyment, with some aspects working really well and some not so much.
Watched on: Mubi
Review by Cipollini ★★★½

In a set of one? I rather enjoyed this otherworldly film.
Review by Dannzel Escobar ★★★★ 2

8.5
Huh, what a curious little picture. Reminded me in part of The Passenger with its cross cultural malaise, except 1000% more stress inducing than Antonioni ever was. Atsuko Maeda gives what'll likely end up being the single most memorable performance I takeaway from this year with her ivory tower turbulence in constant shift all throughout the film. Nearly impossible to pin down where exactly her headspace remains through it all, but I don't think I want to know either.
Goddamn did I think & feel a lot with this one. One of my very favorite films of 2020 right here.
Review by axelkoch ★★★

As Julie Andrews knew well, there’s no problem so big that it can’t be solved by singing a musical number about it in the midst of picturesque mountain scenery
Review by Lucy ★★★★

yoko just fucken bookin it when any of the locals try to speak to her is also me in tokyo when i ask a question in japanese and they respond at a normal speaking speed
Review by glour_glour ★★★★★

Never seen anything quite like this film
Review by Kevin Lloyd ★½

In the manner of the tv crew in the film discarding much of their footage, there might be a short lurking in here which would convey quite as much as these two hours of torpor.
Review by Steve Erickson ★★½ 1

Kiyoshi Kurosawa works best within the boundaries of genre, although his films all have an air of mystery that points to something outside their narrative. But that mystery feels rather empty here. Kurosawa uses widescreen compositions extremely well to convey Yoko's (Atusko Maeda) FOMO and sense of being trapped in a threatening environment, but the vibey feel starts to seem like laziness after the first third and the finale is closer to THE SOUND OF MUSIC than CURE or PULSE. I groaned at the screen every time the goat of freedom appeared. Not a popular opinion, but one of Kurosawa's weakest.
Full review coming next month.
Review by architective ★★★★

Hypnotized by the film's lush pastel look. Dang. Style this good thoroughly enhances substance, for me. But I don't think I'm overrating this, it's great. The story too...
Double Feature: I Know Where I'm Going!
Review by Matthew Sibley ★★★★

A minor story told in a major way; what it takes to push past the fear of what's around the corner of somewhere you don't know when you're desperate to explore and find out. Alone in crowds, whether native or travelling companions. Getting lost externally in the hopes of finding your feet internally.
"Yeah, but it won't make good TV." One of the crew says. Perhaps not, but it is assuredly good cinema.
Could easily become my fave Kurosawa.
Review by DaimajinDE ★★★★½

Kiyoshi Kurosawa überrascht und fasziniert mich immer wieder. Hier mit einem japanischen Blick auf Usbekistan, das Fremdsein, das Begegnen, einen symbolischen Ziegenbock, einem Dolmetscher mit Haltung und einer Frauenrolle, die von zerbrechlich zu stark wechselt - und auch noch zwei Lieder singt.
Die innere Gefühlswelt der Protagonistin spiegelt sich im Land und seinen Widersprüchen und Schönheiten - und das Finale ist Kino pur.
Herrlich, das wird mich wieder tagelang beschäftigen und sinnieren lassen...
Review by Keith Christen ★★★★ 1

Unpredictable and full of heart. Once again Kiyoshi can only make INSANE choices and that’s why we have to Stan.