‘In My Father’s Room’ San Sebastian Review: A Daughter Retraces Her Late Father’s Quiet Life

One of the things that, even when you already know about it in the abstract, still catches you off guard once you’re actually in Japan is the sheer level of care and delicacy that goes into the packaging of almost any product. Buy a simple box of sweets and odds are you’ll end up more seduced by the beauty and elegance of the wrapping — delicate little boxes bound with silk thread and bows — than by the taste of the candy itself. Everything, too, is arranged in stores with the surgical precision of an actual surgeon. Nothing is superfluous, nothing is out of place; everything answers to an aesthetic code as detailed as it is perfect.

I found myself thinking about that while watching In My Father’s Room, a film whose formal beauty conceals a work that is, at bottom, considerably simpler than it appears. A colleague compared it to a MUJI ad — the Japanese brand that also presents its understated products with elegance — and the comparison is a useful shorthand for both the virtues and the shortcomings of this film directed by novelist and art curator Maha Harada. It’s a movie that seduces through its delicacy — antique vessels, minimalist poems, and tea ceremonies are central to its universe — but one that may not, deep down, have quite as much to say as it seems to. Or perhaps, enamored of its own Eastern iconography, it lets everything else slide into the background.

The elegant opening introduces us to Satomi, a woman who works as a guard at a Tokyo museum, tasked mainly with protecting an original Mark Rothko from would-be vandals among the visitors (the painting, apparently at the artist’s own request, has no physical barrier around it whatsoever). But what’s really weighing on Satomi is something else: the recent death of her father, whom she’d stopped seeing some time ago, after he seemingly withdrew from the world following his separation from her mother.

After honoring him with a beautiful and precise tea ceremony, Satomi also makes time to see her mother, who over lunch at a restaurant tells her the reasons behind the split. Satomi is elegant and a woman of few words, but her mother is the opposite: loud, flamboyant, a devoted fan of some Korean pop star, and entirely unguarded when it comes to talking about her own life. It’s clear Satomi inherited far more of her habits from her father than from her mother. And in the «investigation» she undertakes into her father’s life — one that kicks off with a mysterious key she receives — she starts to realize just how many of their coincidences and passions line up.

In My Father’s Room follows that thread, with Satomi juggling work troubles and staff replacements, but mostly sinking deeper into her father’s world: visiting a museum he used to frequent, reading his one published book of poems, and faithfully observing the tea ceremonies the man loved so much. The film is based on the short story An Unnecessary Man, written by the director herself, and its center of gravity is the spiritual — one might say posthumous — connection between Satomi (played by Yu Aoi) and her father. A kind but deeply shy, reserved woman with no friends to speak of, Satomi begins connecting not only with her father, through the poems he left behind, but with her own life — a life she had seemed to treat as though she were merely a tourist passing through it.

And so, amid delicate poems, antique vessels that fascinated both father and daughter, and the bond Satomi forms with a man her own age (Eita Nagayama) who knew her father and becomes her friend, In My Father’s Room unfolds — a film whose fascinating initial delicacy gradually gives way to something too polished and distant, right when the emotions ought to feel more within reach. It’s as if Harada can’t quite bring herself to cut the moorings, and the film never fully steps outside the elegant packaging it arrives in. What at first looks like a small marvel ends up, minute by minute, revealing its limitations.