Ikiru (1952) Review

Originally written September 28, 2025.

Probably the best portrayal of profound existential sadness I’ve seen, courtesy of the quiet and unassuming Takashi Shimura who was one of my favorite of the samurai in Kurosawa’s 1954 historical epic. Ikiru is a very different film, focused intensely on a man’s terminal cancer diagnosis and his reckoning with a life spent as a career man and not much else.

Shimura’s performance as Kanji Watanabe is a true exercise in down-on-your-luck despair. Kurosawa’s camera lingers uncomfortably long on Watanabe throughout the film as he hangs his head and mutters despondently through conversations, eyes welling up with tears or on the verge of doing so. Watanabe’s lamentations about his life spent working and feeling boredom, and his belief that it’s simply too late to do anything meaningful, is sure to leave a lasting impression on me, primed as I am for this sort of existential questioning.

His search for some kind of meaning in the six months he has left to live is well-sequenced, taking him through unsuccessful jaunts in night clubs and then into the presence of a young woman whose energy and love of life rejuvenates him. At the same time, Kurosawa explores Watanabe’s unfulfilling family life and the bureaucracy that instills dispassion and overcomplication of everything, two aggravating factors that practically suffocate him. Watanabe’s brute force overcoming of his workplace structure to fulfill a community’s need for a playground is a joyous celebration for him and us, so sweet it is to see him achieve what he thought would be impossible, though Kurosawa doesn’t let the moment slide without crashing a little bit of reality into it—the bureaucrats very slowly realizing that Watanabe was responsible for the playground agenda being pushed through, swearing that they will act honorable towards their communities going forward, and then immediately falling back into the same old habits is just one of the very real things on display here.

I admire the courage of Kurosawa and Shimura to bring such a difficult story and character to life. I mentioned in my brief review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) that overly-sentimental stories of aging are an almost guaranteed miss for me due to the highly negative feelings they stir up—I guess I prefer my narratives about the irrepressible march of time to be couched in some crazy shit, à la X (2022). But to its credit, Ikiru plays it fairly straight, sticking with real people with real flaws facing real problems and reacting in real ways. Even with its protagonist managing to find some sort of release from his pain, it’s nevertheless a pretty harrowing watch.