Renoir trailer set in 1987 Tokyo

The new U.S. trailer for Renoir is basically a reminder that Chie Hayakawa did not follow Plan 75 with something safer or smaller. She went the other way — into a child’s point of view, a period setting, and a story where almost nothing is loud but everything hurts. The film is set in suburban Tokyo in 1987 and follows 11-year-old Fuki as her father moves in and out of the hospital and her mother tri(thefilmstage.com) the trailer is circulating again now. (thefilmstage.com) ### What is Renoir actually about? It’s a coming-of-age drama, but not in the usual “big milestone” way. Fuki is lonely, curious, and slightly unmoored. Her father, Keiji, is terminally ill. Her mother, Utako, is stretched thin by caregiving and work. Left mostly to herself, Fuki starts drifting toward telepathy, hypnotism, and the occult — not as genre-movie plot devices, but as ways a child tries to make sense of death before she has the language for it. (festival-cannes.com) ### Why set it in 1987? That year matters because the movie is not just “the past” in a vague nostalgic sense. It sits in Japan’s bubble era, which gives the backdrop a strange tension — material comfort on the surface, emotional instability underneath. The trailer and synopsis make clear that Hayakawa is using that late-1980s setting less for retro style than for atmosphere: a world that looks stable while a family quietly comes apart. (thefilmstage.com)on-renoir-opening-this-may/)) ### Why is the child’s perspective the whole point? Because adults process terminal illness through logistics, dread, and denial. Kids process it sideways. Renoir seems built around that sideways logic. Fuki doesn’t respond with grand speeches or clean emotional breakthroughs. She gets interested in hypnosis. She watches adults who are lonely and imperfect. She circles the fact of death instead of confronting it head-on. That’s what gives the film its shape — grief arriving as curiosity. (thefilmstage.com) ### Who’s in it? Yui Suzuki plays Fuki, and the role looks central enough that the whole film rises or falls on how well she can hold the camera’s attention. Lily Franky plays the father, Keiji, and Hikari Ishida plays Utako. Yuumi Kawai, Ayumu Nakajima, Ryota Bando, and Hana Hope are also in the cast. It’s a compact ensemble, which fits a movie that seems more interested in emotional weather than plot mechanics. (festival-cannes.com) ### Why are film people paying attention? Partly because Hayakawa is no longer an emerging name in the loose festival sense. Renoir played in competition at Cannes in 2025, which is a real jump from “promising director” status. It also kept traveling after Cannes — Toronto, Karlovy Vary, Melbourne, Busan, and more — which usually means distributors and programmers see it as durable, not just a one-week festival discovery. (en.wikipedia.org)lan 75 was a near-future social drama with a sharper conceptual hook. Renoir sounds more intimate and less overtly allegorical, but the through-line is easy to spot: Hayakawa keeps returning to how people live beside death before they know what to say about it. The difference is scale. Plan 75 looked at a society. Renoir narrows the frame to one girl and one summer. (thefilmstage.com)# So what is the trailer really selling? Mood, mostly. Not twists. Not prestige-cinema bombast. It’s selling a very specific promise — that Renoir will watch a child’s interior life with unusual patience, and that the 1987 setting is there to deepen that feeling, not distract from it. If that works, the movie lands as more than an art-house grief story. It becomes a film about how children invent strange private systems to survive adult reality. (thefilmstage.com) The bottom line is simple: the trailer matters because it reintroduces Renoir as Hayakawa’s next serious step, not just another festival title finally reaching U.S. screens. The movie opens May 29 in the U.S., and the pitch is clear — a quiet film, a child’s gaze, and a family crisis seen from the angle that hurts most. (thefilmstage.com)