Welcome to the quiet room クワエットルームにようこそ [movie]

Touching your bum makes me feel calm. How about you?

Not really. My legs ache.

Cast:

Asuka - uchida yuki

Tetsu – kudo kankuro 

Miki - aoi yu

Nurse Eguchi – ryo

Komono – tsumabuki satoshi

Nishino – otake shinobu

Sae – Takahashi Mai 

Nurse Yamagishi – Hiraiwa Kami 

I had only seen Uchida Yuki in kami no shizuku and maybe one other thing with a similarly reserved and elegant role, so when I first got this film I didn’t realise it was her for a while. When I finally sat down to watch it I was exited to see how she would play a wayward comedy writer, committed into a psychiatric ward for a suicide attempt, knowing that her character was to be not only troubled but also very textured and quite off the wall.

It is a very colourful film with a disjointed timeline and unique pace with some hallucinatory scenes and flashbacks.

Asuka is admitted to a secure psych ward with a place of isolation they call the quiet room. She wakes up to find herself bound to a bed with restraints, with an oxygen mask and on a drip. We follow her memories as she tries to trace them back to the incident that led her to the hospital but there are missing fragments uncovered much later in the film. Most of our time is spent with Asuka in the present (in the main ward) with the other patients, battling demons she was not even aware she had.

Most of the characters we meet are quirky, obviously you expect the psych ward to host a few interesting personalities but also Asuka’s circle of friends is full of idiotic comedy writers, she surrounds herself with idiots – as she puts it.

A few other really good familiar faces cropped up in this movie.

Ryo (Alive, code blue, casshern, zeni geba, suppli),
Tsumabuki Satoshi (IWGP, long love letter, sabu, waterboys, orange days),

Takahashi Mai  (Boku to Kanojo no XXX, sky high2),

Hiraiwa Kami  (Love my life, otakus in love)

And a liked Aoi yu’s character Miki a lot. She is one of the friends Asuka makes in the ward. I was kind of shocked to see Takahashi Mai, she plays a girl with an eating disorder, who has very rich parents who pay for her to have her own room and Lolita dresses. Having just watched the very stupid Boku To Kimi No XXX where she plays a wimpy boy who is trapped in the body of the tomboyish girl he loves, I was happy to come across her again. And man did she look beautiful. God she’s cute.

Visually, it is an interesting film, but also I think it has a really good gentle unfurling of the story – if that makes sense. It does leap backwards and forwards as she regains the odd piece of her memory from the week before her overdose, and we have the story pieced together along with her progression through her stay in hospital.

Well I thought Uchida Yuki was great, I loved to see her dressed with colourful tights and short hair, being scatty and unkempt. It is a far cry from her role in kami no shizuku for sure and I think it shows her off as an actor really well. She’s damn cute as well.

It isn’t a huge tear jerker, it isn’t very difficult to watch and it is surreal and funny in places (where it is supposed to be) but it does convey enough sadness and loneliness necessary to accurately describe the situation even in amongst the odd humour and twitchingly peculiar characters.

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