It’s hard to watch someone gamble until they bottom out, so I was relieved, in After the Storm, to find that the scenes of failed novelist Ryôta (Hiroshi Abe) borrowing and losing money were frustrating but brief. Divorced, working as a private investigator, and estranged from most of his family thanks to his parasitic money borrowing, Ryôta is stuck trying to subsist on his earlier successes, despite a long overdue need to come to terms with his current reality.
If After the Storm seems familiar, it’s because we recently saw another of director Hirokazu Koreeda’s small, intergenerational family portraits with 2015’s Our Little Sister.
