Best Ever
Drama Movie?

Nothing happens in Tokyo Story. An elderly couple visits their adult children in Tokyo. The children are busy, distracted, mildly inconvenienced by their parents’ presence. The parents go home. The mother dies. That’s it. That’s the entire plot. And yet by the final scene—a widower sitting alone in his empty house, nodding at the truth of his solitude—you’ve watched one of the most devastating films ever made.

Yasujirō Ozu shot almost everything from about three feet off the ground, the eye level of someone kneeling on a tatami mat. The camera rarely moves. Characters enter and exit the frame rather than being followed. The pace is deliberate, patient, almost meditative. Western audiences sometimes struggle with this—where’s the conflict? where’s the momentum?—until they realize that Ozu isn’t withholding drama. He’s showing you that ordinary life is the drama.

Chishū Ryū and Chieko Higashiyama play the parents, Shukichi and Tomi, with a gentleness that borders on heartbreaking. Watch how they respond to their children’s excuses, their polite deflections when offered cheap sake or sent on a tour they didn’t ask for. There’s no resentment. There’s barely even disappointment. Just a quiet adjustment of expectations, a lifetime’s practice in accepting that things are as they are. Ryū’s face in the final scenes—that stoic smile, those eyes full of something he’ll never say aloud—is one of cinema’s great portraits of contained grief.

The children aren’t villains. This is crucial. The son is a doctor with patients to see. The daughter runs a beauty salon. They’re not cruel, just ordinary—busy with their own lives in the way that everyone becomes busy with their own lives. Ozu refuses to judge them even as he documents the distance growing between generations. The most they can offer is polite hospitality, and polite hospitality turns out to be a kind of abandonment.

Only Noriko, the widow of their son who died in the war, treats the parents with genuine warmth. Setsuko Hara’s performance is luminous—she smiles constantly, but there’s something underneath the smile, some well of loneliness she’s channeling into kindness. When the mother tells her she should remarry, that she can’t waste her life mourning the dead, the scene devastates because both women know Noriko won’t take the advice. Devotion has become her identity. She doesn’t know who else to be.

The final exchange between Noriko and Shukichi is the emotional core. She confesses she’s not as good as they think, that she’s selfish, that days go by without her thinking of their dead son. He tells her she’s a good woman, the best they’ve known. Both are telling the truth. The scene is almost unbearably sad because Ozu has shown us the whole picture: a family drifting apart, a widow clinging to connection, an old man facing death alone. And no one is at fault. That’s just how life works.

Ozu made fifty-four films, and Tokyo Story is often called his masterpiece, though he might have disagreed—he thought he was just making the same movie over and over, refining his themes. Family. Generational change. The gap between expectation and reality. The Japanese call his mood mono no aware, the pathos of things, an awareness of impermanence that produces not despair but acceptance. Tokyo Story is the purest expression of that sensibility ever filmed.

The ending offers no catharsis. A neighbor stops by, remarks that Shukichi will be lonely now, says she’ll bring him dinner sometime. He thanks her. He sits. The film ends. There’s no music swell, no redemptive gesture, no suggestion that meaning can be extracted from loss. There’s just a man in a room, facing the rest of his life, nodding slightly as if to say: yes, this is how it is.

Somehow, that’s enough.

Yasujirō Ozu: The Best Ever is stillness as revelation. Is Tokyo Story the Best Ever Arthouse Drama? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• For the complete experience, grab the Criterion Blu-ray—the new 4K restoration is essential.
• The Late Ozu Eclipse Series DVD set also lets you dive deeper into his post-war mastery.