Inspired since childhood by the Heisei Kamen Rider series, Yoshiki Matsumoto held a superhero show and made a movie for his high school festival, and found himself becoming fascinated by the world of film. After studying filmmaking under Gakuryu Ishii at Kobe Design University Department of Image Arts, he has made films while working full-time. He moved from Nara to Tokyo in 2022 to form the filmmaking unit SETAGAYA SENSEMANS, where he has worked on various films, mainly as an editor. “Alien's Daydream” is his feature debut, for which he also holds the roles of writer, editor, production designer and cinematographer.
Alien's Daydream is screening at Skip City International D-Cinema Festival
Reporter Uto writes for a magazine that deals with occultism and unusual phenomena for the most part. He also has a strong sense of justice and hates lies, and he retains a blog that allows him to write his opinion without any restrictions. When he receives news about an alien abducting a university student in Hakui, he begins an investigation that reveals a number of unexpected things, in a territory that UFOs seem to have been witnessed for hundreds of years, even resulting in the creation of a religion/cult. In the meantime, his interactions with the abductee, Noa, gets more and more strange.
Yoshiki Matsumoto creates a pastiche of different cinematic and narrative elements, in an approach that is as chaotic as it is intricate and intriguing. The narrative is dominated by a sense of mystery and disorientation, through a number of secrets that are revealed, each of which both result in a new revelation and a new perspective of the story, but also create more questions. This labyrinthine approach, although occasionally confusing and definitely including some elements that could be deemed unnecessary, actually works quite well in terms of entertainment, essentially carrying the movie from beginning to end of its 99 minutes. The fact that Matsumoto presents the story through an approach that combines elements of documentary, news strip, sci-fi, thriller, horror and family drama also works in the same path, in the second most impressive trait of his direction.
Check also this interview
This approach benefits the most by his editing, with the way he combines all the aforementioned elements adding to the creation of the overall atmosphere here, while frequently inducing the film with a very appealing, rather fast pace, which does tone down on occasion, though, in order to avoid making the movie dizzying. Also of note here is the way the story is split into chapters, with each one including a rather impressive painting, all of which were created by Matsumoto and the protagonist, Natsuki Yamada, and are actually eventually implemented in the narrative in organic fashion. Matsumoto's cinematography is also on a very high level, with the desaturated approach that has come to dominate similar Japanese productions implemented nicely here, and the images of the bucolic setting being both mysterious and captivating. The SFX, although evidently not the product of a high budget, are definitely serviceable while adding to the overall visual prowess.
The comments deriving from the overall unique approach are also interesting. The concept of cults and how they can attract people is one that eventually becomes central, but the director also deals with abnormal love, preconceptions and assumptions and the role the press plays in them, which also leads to the whole concept of “what is reality and what fantasy?” A last one derives from blogging, and although somewhat on-the-nose, still manages to remark on how paid journalism nowadays suffers from the pursuit of profit, while amateur writing gifts the people who write in that fashion with complete freedom.
Yukichi Tanaka as Uto has a rather difficult role of presenting a man whose pursuit for truth gets him more and more confused and even angry on occasion, but he passes with flying colors in a truly great performance that is in perfect resonance with the film's aesthetics. Natsuki Yamada as Noa emits an otherworldly sense with gusto, with her acting being one of the main sources of the overall atmosphere here.
“Alien's Daydream” may go too far and away in its story on occasion, but as a whole, it definitely makes sense, with the narrative and visual approach being truly great, in one of the most intriguing Japanese movies of the year.
