Two Seasons, Two Strangers: an elegant, sensitive celebration of introverts

• Reviewed from the 2025 Locarno Film Festival

In 2022, Japanese director Miyake Sho broke out – if that is not altogether too boisterous a term – with his gorgeously intimate, Berlinale-premiering inversion of the boxing movie, Small, Slow but Steady. It’s a title that could double as a manifesto for Miyake’s approach: Last year, the director fielded another lambent Berlin entry with All The Long Nights, the tale of the low-key luminous relationship between two misfit office workers. And now he has sidled softly into the Locarno competition, only to sidle softly out again clutching its top prize, for Two Seasons, Two Strangers, a wittily bifurcated story that, aside from being comfortable in the quiet, shares with Miyake’s previous charmers a sensitivity to the dynamics of interactions between introverts. Even the most stalwart Miyake loner may discover that it can be much more pleasant to be alone together than to be alone alone. 

The introvert-in-chief here is Li (Eun-kyung Shim), a Korean expat living in Japan where she works as a TV and film screenwriter. We open with Li, who speaks fluent Japanese but whose interior monologue is narrated to us in Korean, engaged in that least cinematic of activities: writing. Given that it’s a process integral to the vast majority of moviemaking, the writing life is both overrepresented and frequently misrepresented at the movies, as actors struggle to externalise an undynamically internal process, in roles that can suffer from a sort of dramatic inflation having been written, of course, by writers. Miyake, aided by a wonderfully gentle, spontaneous performance from Shim, avoids any of this. This first scene, as Li gestures abstractly in the air in front of her like she’s catching imaginary Pokémon and finally lights up briefly as an idea somehow coalesces, is the darndest thing: a recognisable representation of the writer’s lot, in all its private drama and public dorkiness. 

Suddenly we’re following the story Li is writing (both halves of the film are based on otherwise unconnected short stories by celebrated manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge), as a young woman, Nagisa (Kawai Yuumi) encounters solitary local Natsuo (Takada Mansaku) in the coastal town she’s aimlessly visiting. They walk and talk and share memories, some of them dark. They arrange to meet again, and even though the weather and the changeable late-summer seas are unreliable, they do. It’s a romance but one that exists to prove that people don’t need to touch, let alone kiss or fall into bed with each other, for there to exist a connection that hums almost audibly across the space between them. 

But just as we’re becoming accustomed to this companionable register, the frame pulls wide and we’re back with Li, the screenwriter of the film about Nagisa, that has been showing to a small, and not terribly impressed, audience of students. “I didn’t get it,” states one bluntly. Li, visibly quailing during the Q&A is asked how she feels seeing her own work up there. “It makes me think…” she stammers, “…that I don’t have much talent.” Perhaps it’s this sudden erosion of confidence, or perhaps the peculiar interruption of an unexpected death, or perhaps it’s simply that her next screenplay is stalled (rather hilariously when asked what it’s about, Li replies miserably “Ninjas”). Li, like Nagisa before her, flees to a place she’s never been before. Only this time it’s winter, the landscape picturesquely but inconveniently snowbound, and her tentative connection comes with Benzo (Tsutsumi Shinichi), the grouchy owner of the only inn in the area with any room left. In fact, the inn has all the room left: the place is in barely-heated disrepair, which makes it the perfect setting for these under-construction, closed-for-maintenance characters to work through their polite personal crises, first by themselves and eventually, drawing closer to the stove for warmth, in concert. 

Li’s Korean background seems to have emboldened Miyake to pay glancing narrative homage to Hong Sang-soo, with the Korean arthouse master’s recurrent preoccupations with diptychs, memory and the passage of time dovetailing in quite exquisite ways with Miyake’s investment in the introspective, contemplative personality. But Two Strangers, Two Seasons is still very much a Miyake film, unfolding in a playful but deeply felt register that is perhaps more melancomedy than tragicomedy, but that delivers the rare satisfaction of watching modest, thoughtful people find just what they need in the last place they’d expect it: in the small, slow, steady corners of the world which is where, Miyake Sho will convince you, all of life actually happens.