‘Dear Stranger’: A Slow, Gruelling Story Of Two Halves
The drama of strained relationships burdened by conflict between career and family is nothing new in the realm of cinema. Time and time again, these themes are presented tandem with one another. In Dear Stranger, director and screenwriter Tetsuya Mariko offers a story tackling these ideas with a few added twists and turns, in Toei Company’s first English-language live action feature.
Released in Japan on Friday, September 12, 2025, the film is a Japan-Taiwan-US co-production, produced by Toei Company, Rollin Studios, ROJI, and Lou Lou Film Studio. It stars Nishijima Hidetoshi and Gwei Lun-Mei as Kenji Saiga and Jane Yang; a married couple living in New York with their son Kai, played by Everest Talde. Kenji and Jane’s relationship is put to the test as they struggle to balance their work, parenting, and caregiving. However, things are turned on their head when their son is kidnapped, leading to secrets being uncovered and the rift between the couple growing. The viewer is left to wonder what will become of them through their experiences and what the future for them may hold.
The plot itself can best be split into two distinct halves, and unfortunately, the film is at its most pedestrian and sluggish in its first half. The film currently sits at two hours and 18 minutes in length, but the story could have easily been told in less time. The first half moves at a glacial pace, and there’s a handful of scenes that don’t seem to offer a lot of information that the audience cannot piece together themselves. Mariko clearly wants to cover every aspect of the couple’s struggles, but sometimes less is more. The couple’s struggle to maintain a work-life balance is made very apparent early on, but additional elements, such as caregiving for Jane’s father, ultimately feel superfluous as they do not come up again in the film’s latter half. Another prime example of this excess is a scene where Kenji goes to an empty and abandoned theater and seemingly hallucinates in there. Though the scene is brought up later, since it is the place where Kenji and Jane first met, it ultimately contributes little to the overall narrative and the couple’s conversations. Cutting these would have led to a shorter runtime and a cleaner, more concise narrative.
However, once the film reaches its inciting incident at the 50-minute mark, it finds its footing. The plot suddenly becomes far more engaging, with the kidnapping bringing out the secrets and emotions that Kenji and Jane have bottled up for so many years. Even after having recovered their son, the film takes the correct amount of time to examine the aftermath, showing that all cannot go back to normal despite the characters’ insistence that it should. A twist midway through the second act adds a whole new layer to the couple’s dilemma, as pressure from the police steadily increases due to suspicions of murder. The emotions are allowed to explode on-screen and are explored thoroughly, leading to an ending that feels mature and realistic as opposed to one that resolves everything with a neat bow.
Nishijima Hidetoshi, most well-known for his role as Yūsuke Kafuku in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, very much embodies the two halves of the film in his performance. In the first half, he felt quite bland and safe, with every line delivery feeling too similar to the last and little that really brought out his talent as an actor. In the second half, Nishijima is given far more substantive material to work with, and his performance is the standout of the final 10 minutes. It does force the viewer to look back on his first half performance with a hint of disappointment, but he brilliantly portrays a man who has finally come to acknowledge his part in the whole mess, coming to terms with his guilt and finally willing to commit himself to a better future with Kai and Jane.
But the standout performance of the entire film is Gwei Lun-Mei as Jane Yang. Despite having second billing, the film clearly places her as the protagonist, and Gwei Lun-Mei holds the film together from start to finish. The audience can feel the weight of her struggles slowly crush her, and her moments of grief, regret, and fear are all brilliantly portrayed. What is more impressive are Jane’s moments of levity and joy when she works as the director of a puppet theater. All of this is balanced perfectly and expertly portrayed. For the film’s entire runtime, there is no moment where she isn’t putting 100% in.
A special mention should go to Mia Reece as Monica Lombera. Despite only having a few minutes of screentime, she makes the most of it. Every scene of hers is gripping and a joy to watch.
Gwei Lun-Mei’s excellent performance does immense work on the film’s behalf, since she is all that is preventing the audience from losing interest in the first half. Even the creative elements are lacking in this period of the film. The cinematography does nothing ambitious, with very few instances of unique camera techniques and only showing the audience what they need to see, with little interest in pure visual storytelling. There are certainly a few lingering establishing shots that could have easily been cut down to help with the pacing. The ultimate consequence of the slow pace is that it leaves the viewer not with a sense that the couple is overwhelmed with their work, family, and each other, but rather that they are simply bored of their lives, which is incongruent with the overall messaging of the film.
But as often repeated in this review, the second half feels completely different. There is an excellent sequence that cuts between both Jane and Kenji at their respective workplaces, both thriving in their environments and, most importantly, finding joy in their passions. This then makes the simultaneous kidnapping of Kai hit that much harder. It is a brilliant moment that illustrates how the couple lose sight of what is truly important, blinded by their ambitions and personal desires. This is far from the only moment in the second half that fully utilizes strong visual storytelling.
Yet, despite this excellence, this sequence was not without flaw. The choice of music, which could be best described as elevator music, feels ill-suited to the scene. The sequence, whilst visually poignant, lacks the urgency and panic of the situation. Kenji runs around in a desperate search, but the music suggests little to no desperation whatsoever. Silence would have been preferable, with the only sound heard being the character’s panic. The music throughout the film is fine and complements what happens on-screen, but it never rises above that.
Despite the second half’s overall uptick in quality, it is also far from flawless. A problem that often comes up in a few instances throughout the film is with the dialogue. While it is mostly solid, if a bit obvious and safe, there are instances where the characters say what they’re feeling in too poetic a way to come across as realistic. An example of this is Jane saying, “My heart is going to burst,” followed by a remark about how she has been bottling all this up for five years. Gwei Lun-Mei delivers these lines with such emotion, and yet, it feels like a writer talking, not a character.
There are also a handful of moments in the plot that are incredibly contrived, primarily a car crash at the end of the film which the lead detective happens to be in the vicinity of. Earlier in the film, that same detective makes an assumption regarding the kidnapping with little evidence that clearly only serves to point the audience towards an obvious conclusion.
Speaking of conclusions, what may make or break this film for a viewer is how much they can stomach unresolved plotlines. There are certainly a few in this film that feel inconsequential, such as the notion that the kidnapper is in fact Kai’s biological father. Despite the character’s insistence that it is a big deal, it never feels as such, since both Kenji and Jane are aware of the truth from the beginning. As for the kidnapper himself, he feels like an inconsequential plot device, with little to offer as a character. There are hints of a desire to be a father, but that is snuffed out swiftly once he is no longer needed.
A final missed opportunity is to do with language. Throughout the film, both Kenji and Jane speak in English to one another, clearly trying to gain fluency. At the same time, they speak their respective native languages with certain individuals, such as Jane with her mother. A moment at the end sees Kenji confessing in Japanese, as if this is a moment of him being honest with himself. While that does feel like a proper pay-off, the rest of the film doesn’t appear to make use of the many avenues of exploration that language has to offer. This film is juggling quite a few themes and ideas, and it feels as though this one was lost in the middle.
That being said, the setup for both Kenji’s and Jane’s work life pays off brilliantly in the second half, with Jane directing a puppet show and Kenji giving a lecture on ruins. Because Tetsuya Mariko has taken the time to show how both thrive in their respective fields, the culmination of their individual work is enhanced and reshaped by the incident that has befallen them and their son. The audience is left to interpret their respective final works through the lens of the film’s events leading up to it and how it all thematically weaves together.
The ending itself further enhances this. Many stories similar to this one would resolve with the couple coming back together and finding a way to put their family first without sacrificing their desires, sometimes even finding that their family is all they really need. If the film had ended this way, it would feel cheap and rob the film of its emotional weight. Instead, Mariko opts to end his film with something more ambiguous, leaving the audience to interpret and speculate how the couple’s life will go forward given that both have now come to terms with what has happened.
In the end, Dear Stranger is a worthwhile watch if one can overcome the dull first half thanks to Gwei Lun-Mei’s riveting performance. The second half, despite its flaws, fully delivers. It is incredibly engaging and so full of life that it will ultimately leave the viewer satisfied that they watched this film.