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True Mothers Movie Review

True Mothers is a 2020 Japanese drama film directed by Naomi Kawase and starring Hiromi Nagasaku and Agata Iura. It’s a moving, but overlong movie.

An adopted son’s mother receives an unexpected visit from the boy’s biological mother. This is a strong drama about adoption and the possible complications that can arise from it. Thematically speaking, the movie was very interesting to me as I find this subject matter fascinating and very important as adoptive parents are only going to grow in number in the near future. This movie deals delicately with this subject and doesn’t wring too many emotionally manipulative scenes from it. It’s moving, but not manipulative.

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The performances from all of the actors are terrific and the characters are quite well developed. Their relationships are very well realized and the flashback structure actually worked in the first half as it gave the necessary insight into the main couple’s struggles to have a biological child and how they came to the decision to adopt.

The problem arose in the second half where we suddenly got introduced to the flashback of Satoko’s biological mother and this is where the movie stumbled unfortunately. I do understand the intent from the filmmaker to make an epic family drama, but it just did not work out properly. Couple that with that very annoying, uninteresting and utterly unnecessary crime subplot and you’ve got a total mess of a second half that hurt an otherwise strong former half of the movie.

True Mothers, thus, reminded me of ‘A Sun’, though it is a much better movie than that one. But still, I find these sprawling family dramas to not be my cup of tea as I prefer a lesser number of characters and a better focus. I do realize that Naomi Kawase is a famous director from Japan, but here her direction wasn’t the greatest and the pacing is too slow. The runtime of two and a half hours was just way too long and it reduced the impact of the film significantly.

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While True Mothers is very well acted, quite moving at times and it deals with an important subject matter, it is ultimately only strong in the very well made first half while the second half was overly sprawling and messy in pacing and structure. It’s a fine drama at first, but later down the line its overlong runtime significantly reduced its impact unfortunately.

My Rating – 3.5