While the big Valentine’s Day release, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is centred around love and loss, there’s another film out this weekend dealing with similar themes that is well worth tracking down. Cottontail is a sweet, tenderly understated drama about a newly-widowed Japanese man whose strained relationship with his son is tested further on a tip to scatter his wife’s ashes on Lake Windermere. Slightly formulaic but suffused with a gorgeously gossamer melancholy, it makes the case that despite cultural differences, there is more that unites us than divides.

Just after the funeral of his wife Akiko (Tae Kimura), novelist Kenzaburo (Lily Franky) receives a letter written by Akiko before the Alzheimer’s disease that claimed her became too advanced. Her wish is that Kenzaburo and his son Toshi (Ryo Nishikido) travel to the UK and scatter her at a specific spot on Lake Windermere, scene of a particularly cherished childhood memory.

Father and son make the journey, along with Toshi’s wife and daughter. But when they arrive in London, the curmudgeonly Kenzaburo rejects Toshi’s itinerary and heads off on his own, getting lost on the way, and finding himself at the firm of another widower John (Ciarán Hinds) and his daughter Mary (Hinds’ real-life daughter Aoife).

Writer/ director Patrick Dickinson‘s debut – based on his own experiences living in the UK and Japan – flows in non-linear fashion between the present, and the memories Kenzaburo shared with his Akiko, both as young adults and as at various stages of her disease. These transitions are carried out seamlessly by editor Andy Jadavji, in a way reminiscent of another tastefully restrained and thematically similar work, Hong Khaou‘s Lilting. Through these scenes, the details of Kenzaburo’s relationship with his wife and his partial estrangement with his son is slowly revealed. This beautiful drift simulates the ebb and flow of memory and bolster the film’s emotional core against some of the occasionally schematic moments of its narrative.

Lead Lily Franky is a regular of Hirokazu Koreeda, and there are definite echoes of the beloved Shoplifters and Like Father, Like Son director, and by extension elder masters like Mizoguchi and Ozu. There is also a similar sense of cross-cultural curiosity and ‘not all who wander are lost’ patience of Wim Wenders. Ciarán and Aoife Hinds have essentially glorified cameos but demonstrate both the universality of Kenzaburo’s situation across cultural divides, and as an instance of the kind of mutual support between father and child that has gone sadly awry between Kenzaburo and Toshi.

Against the stunning backdrop of the Lake District, with its often unforgiving nature very much intact, Cottontail – the title a Beatrix Potter reference – is very aware of its strengths and how they can augment its simple story. If it’s a plunge into big emotion you’re after, this is not that film. Its power creeps up like memory itself, but it is a gorgeous and tender work about acceptance and reconciliation made with impressive craft.

In selected cinemas Fri 14 Feb 2025