Drive My Car, Japan's official selection in the Best International Feature at the Oscars, together with being a triple-prize winner at Cannes, provides a slowly mesmerising experience that delivers many rewards. It's a fascinating adaptation of a short story by the Japanese writer Hakumi Murakami, and it's been modified with imagination and extra depth by delicate motions and a timeless grace as it moves along its steady, thoughtful, contemplative journey. It's a strangely affecting drama, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, that produces a beam of modest brilliance that resonates steadily throughout its engrossing three-hour runtime. It begins as a story of a marriage threatened by unspoken secrets before evolving into a story of revenge and a growing friendship between two strangers in a car, who discover they have more in common than they initially believed. Hamaguchi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Takamasa Oe, has taken Murakami's original story as a springboard instead of a rigid template, altering and adding locations, creating additional characters and strengthening the significance of others. Drive My Car is a flawlessly measured drama from Hamaguchi, whose threads beautifully intertwine and overlap, twisting into one another to evolve into a captivating meditation about loss, mourning and survival.