GFF 2025: Super Happy Forever

A non-linear love story that switches between a relationship's definitive end and its serendipitous beginnings, Kohei Igarashi's Super Happy Forever is gentle in pace but a knockout in terms of cumulative impact. It's a major work in a deceptively minor key.

The opening third tracks the very-recently-widowed Sano, played by Hiroki Sano. His remarkable performance is one where all the still-fresh emotions and thoughts concerning his wife's sudden death are conveyed with a striking, heavy physicality to every action. In navigating his new world, Sano tries reliving an old one, returning to the seaside hotel where he first met Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto) five years earlier, accompanied by his friend Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata).

Miyata's optimistic outlook on life clashes with Sano's obsessive, almost weaponised handling of his grief. Sano stays in Nagi's same room from before and retraces their steps from that fateful trip, searching for a lost red cap. During Igarashi's next narrative gambit, we learn that Sano also brought the same clothes from that vacation, though crucially, this long flashback to the meet-cute is told from Nagi's perspective; making memories more concrete by corroborating details we've been told from just Sano's side.

The beautiful effect of merging these perspectives is an enrichment of the emotional spark to each small interaction, making the past feel like the present. Despite the tragic layers built in from the start, Super Happy Forever becomes a profoundly romantic film; one with an ambiguous denouement that gestures towards an uncertain but hopeful future in how mementos of a life can sow unexpected influences.