A couple are about to get married, but then one day the woman just disappears, and the man doesn’t know what’s going on. Will he find her, or is she dead?
April, Come She Will is a moving drama that feels like a generic Japanese movie about first love, remembering the past, and three confused characters trying to find themselves. The protagonist, who is a psychiatrist, meets a woman who is a veterinarian, and they fall in love. But is it true love, or do they just need someone to talk to and listen to them?
Then one day, the psychiatrist’s first love starts writing to him, and we visit his past and see what happened to the psychiatrist’s first love and what broke them apart. After that, right before he’s going to get married, the woman disappears without leaving a trace, and he walks around like a zombie, thinking about the past and what he may have done wrong to the woman he was supposed to marry.
The psychiatrist is a pretty boring character who walks around like a zombie, and he’s not a likable character. He’s an enclosed character who doesn’t say much. He’s played by Takeru Satoh, the actor who played the protagonist in the live-action movies of Rurouni Kenshin. The most interesting character is the veterinarian, played by the excellent Masami Nagasawa. Luckily for us, she takes over in the last half hour of the movie, where we see what her story is.
There is a lot of dialogue between the characters as they try to tell us what their problems are, what they are afraid of, and the connection they are looking for in their partner. They are looking for their soulmates, but the psychiatrist is so broken after he broke up with his first love, who he believed was the woman in his life. And he hasn’t forgotten her, and that doesn’t help when the woman he is supposed to marry finds out. So she just disappears, and the psychiatrist must find people to talk to and try to figure out what he’s going to do since he must be the worst psychiatrist in the world, who is a selfish fool.
The problem with Japanese romantic drama movies is that most of them feel the same. The quality is decent, but if you have watched a lot of these movies, there’s nothing that sticks out to make you need to watch April, Come She Will. I watched the movie because I’m a big fan of Masami Nagasawa, and she is always good. Unfortunately, she doesn’t get much help from Takeru Satoh, who creates no believable chemistry to make you believe they really care about each other. It’s Masami Nagasawa and Nana Mori, who play the psychiatrist’s first love, that carry this movie on their womanly shoulders. They show us what emotions truly are, and Nana Mori exudes a special aura when she smiles and laughs. Shame on you, Takeru Satoh, for sleepwalking through the role of the world’s worst and most boring psychiatrist!