Drive My Car (2021)

Drive My Car is one of those rare dramas that makes time feel richer, not longer—an unhurried, quietly riveting film where grief, art, and human connection begin to speak to each other in unexpected ways. Ryusuke Hamaguchi directs with a novelist’s patience and a surgeon’s precision, letting silences, rehearsals, and long drives accumulate into something profoundly moving without ever begging for your tears. Hidetoshi Nishijima and Toko Miura give beautifully restrained performances that invite you to lean in, while the Uncle Vanya backdrop adds a hypnotic, contemplative vibe about the roles we play and the truths we avoid. It’s not for everyone if you need plot fireworks or a brisk runtime, but if you’re open to a film that listens as much as it talks, it can feel like a deep breath you didn’t realize you needed.

Drive My Car is aiming for a quiet, literary meditation on grief and connection, using long car rides and a multilingual Uncle Vanya production as its emotional engine. It’s beautifully acted and thoughtfully composed, but it’s also three hours of deliberate pacing, extended rehearsal scenes, and conversations that unfold in slow, careful layers rather than big dramatic payoffs. If you get impatient with films that feel more like a novel being read aloud than a plot being “pushed forward,” this may test your endurance and possibly feel self-important. But if you’re willing to settle in for something patient, emotionally precise, and more about listening than spectacle, it can be genuinely moving.