In director Tetsuya Mariko's ambitious fourth feature, two talented leads are trapped in a muddy domestic drama. Set in New York City, Dear Stranger tackles race, culture, marriage, and other topics in a suspense format that comes up short.
Hidetoshi Nishijima plays Kenji Saiga, an architecture professor desperate to win tenure. His wife Jane (Gwei Lun-Mei), or Yang Yi-zhen, put her career as a puppeteer on hold to raise their five-year-old son Kai (Everest Talde). She also has to care for her aging parents and their small grocery store.
Kenji and Jane are privileged, but still live on the edge of poverty. Kenji's imperfect English and anger issues threaten his career. Jane has a domineering mother and doubts about her creativity. Lurking over them is a dark secret they refuse to discuss.
Jane and Kai are in their parents' grocery when thugs rob it. Later someone tags her car with spray paint. Kenji keeps a gun in the trunk of the car, but it's stolen when he visits an auto mechanic.
Everything changes when Kai disappears while visiting Kenji's school. The police seem to treat Kenji as a suspect. "I hear the academic world is tough," Bixby (Christopher Mann), an unsympathetic detective, says to him.
Tone-deaf dialogue is an unfortunate feature of Mariko's screenplay. "When was the last time we had sex?" Jane asks. "Did I ever love you?" The characters argue relentlessly about what viewers already know, hashing over past hurts and recriminations.
Much of the movie unfolds in abandoned theaters and auto shops, in rainy, garbage-strewn lots at night, along hostile sidewalks. It's a New York filled with predators. Even day-school teachers start fights.
Kai's kidnapper turns out to be Donny Fox (Julian Wang), Jane's former lover. Kenji fights Donny at one point in a grimly vicious, well-staged scene. Plot twists involving a gun, a wronged girlfriend, and a car accident keep shifting the focus of the story.
Nishijima, the lead in Drive My Car, is a fascinating performer whose hangdog expressions can hide or reveal a wide array of emotions. However, his English is very hard to understand, even with subtitles. Gwei Lun-Mei, a superb femme fatale in Chinese noirs like The Wild Goose Lake, is excellent here.
Individual scenes in Mariko's script can ring true, but his jumps in narrative logic, sudden introduction of hidden background details, and moments of indulgence—like a six-minute puppet sequence—will be difficult for a lot of viewers to accept. Overall, Dear Stranger might have worked better told in a language other than English.
International premiere in the Window on Asian Film section of the Busan International Film Festival. Photos courtesy of Roji Films, TOEI COMPANY, LTD. Visit the festival's official page for the film for more information.