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Adrift in Tokyo is, quite simply put, an amazing movie. On the surface, this movie is about two guys walking through the streets of Tokyo, but this movie is so much more than that. It is about building relationships, about leaving people and finding people and about luck. It is about loneliness and belonging and, most of all, it is about Tokyo.

Adrift in Tokyo is about Fumiya Takemura, a law student with a gambling problem. He owes $800,000 yen (about $8,000 dollars) to a loan shark and he doesn’t have it. He also has absolutely no way to get it. The enforcer who is comes to get the money, Aiichiro Fukuhara, is an interesting character. The first time we meet him he is both harsh and comic at the same time, but still means business. Later Fukuhara comes to Takemura with a proposal. Fukuhara will give his employers the money that Takemura owes and wipe his slate clean if Takemura will accompany him on a walk. It seems like a trap, but it is as simple as that, just a walk. Even though Takemura is skeptical, he cannot deny that this is an excellent deal, so he agrees. As they walk through the streets of Tokyo, they learn a great deal about themselves, each other and the city in this heartwarming story of two very different, but very similar men.

To be honest, I prefer the Japanese title of this movie, Tenten, which roughly translated means “rapidly changing”, something that applies to this movie perfectly. The set up for the movie happens so quickly that the audience doesn’t have very much time to reflect on either man’s character, which I believe was a brilliant framing device in order to show you who they are in bits and pieces in over the course of the walk. As they walk you discover that while one man has a great deal in his life, he really has nothing, and while the other has nothing, he is really the richer of the two, having a life’s worth of potential ahead of him. These two men foil each other perfectly, occasionally brutal, occasionally funny. It is beautiful to watch the friendship evolve as they stroll, almost aimlessly through the streets of the beautiful city of Tokyo.

While the Japanese title holds more for me, the English title has honed in on one very important element of the movie: Tokyo is the third character in this movie. As you begin to uncover more and more about our two main characters and watch their relationship grow, so to does the audience’s involvement with Tokyo itself. Just as we begin to really uncover who these men are, we begin to see who Toyko really is. The lights, the landscape, the food and the people of Tokyo are unveiled in an intimate way that makes this movie endlessly fascinating. This is the kind of movie you can revisit again and again and see something new every time.

This was my introduction to both actors, Jô Odagiri and Tomokazu Miura, and both were excellent in their roles. Both roles required a great deal of character development and exposition from them, but also a range of emotion, and I think the fact that I had not seen them before really helped to deepen my involvement in the movie. Although, I understand that Odagiri is quite a comedic favorite in Japan.

A short movie, coming in at 101 minutes, it fills the time well without making you feel as though time is either dragging or speeding. It is an excellent movie, that touched me quite a lot and had the unexpected side effect of making me take time to examine my own place in my own large city, my relationships and my occasional loneliness, despite living in one of the largest cities in Canada. Adrift in Tokyo is open in some cities currently and will open in Toronto on Friday, May 1. While Wolverine might be a crap-shoot, this movie is a solid pleaser. Go see this instead. The wolf can wait.