Super Happy Forever

In Kohei Igarashi’s beguiling film, Sano (Hiroshi Sano) and his friend Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata) return to the seaside town where Sano met his wife Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto) five years ago. Nagi is now deceased, and the trip is part of an attempt to exorcise Sano’s grief. Eventually, the director takes us back in time, showing the couple’s first meeting…

Kohei shoots in long, cool takes that allow for contemplation even as the story remains engrossing. Sano and Nagi’s strange, felicitous first meeting is key to the film’s themes of chance, personality, and the strange and often cruel ways they intersect. Hiroshi Sano gives a fine performance, exuding dazed grief in the film’s opening section and altering his technique with the leap back to brighter times.

The poignancy of Super Happy Forever lies in its unseen tensions, its negative spaces, and the ellipsis of five years where its characters assumed they had all the time in the world to recreate this level of happiness […] Igarashi’s coolly moving miniature doesn’t exhort viewers to do anything so obvious or sentimental as seize the day: merely to hold onto it, for a year or two or five, and to let go of it when the time comes.

Guy Lodge, Variety

Thoroughly moving and decidedly delicate, the film is a major work of emotionally charged, poetic existentialism, and a beautiful tribute to the enigmatic experience of being in love.

Matthew Joseph Jenner, International Cinephile Society

Super Happy Forever is gentle in pace but a knockout in terms of cumulative impact. It’s a major work in a deceptively minor key… A profoundly romantic film.

Josh Slater Williams, The Skinny