Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story expands a slim premise, a widowed theater director is chauffeured by a young woman during a residency in Hiroshima, into a three-hour exploration of grief, communication, and the ways that performance can reveal truths that life conceals. The film follows Yusuke Kafuku, still processing his wife’s death two years later, as he directs a multilingual production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and slowly opens up to his driver, Misaki.
The film won the Academy Award for Best International Feature and was widely regarded as one of the finest films of its decade.
The Silence Inside the Car
The sequences inside Yusuke’s red Saab 900 are the film’s emotional center. The confined space creates an intimacy that allows for a kind of honesty that open spaces don’t. Yusuke and Misaki begin in professional silence and gradually move toward genuine conversation, and Hamaguchi lets this progression happen with extraordinary patience. No scene feels rushed, no confession arrives before the characters are ready for it.
Hidetoshi Nishijima’s performance as Yusuke achieves something rare: he makes stillness expressive. His grief is carried in the set of his shoulders, in pauses before speaking, in the way he listens to recordings of his dead wife’s voice reading Chekhov. The restraint of the performance makes his eventual emotional openness devastating.
The multilingual Uncle Vanya production, performed in Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and Korean Sign Language, becomes the film’s central metaphor. Characters speaking different languages, unable to understand each other’s words but connected through shared performance, mirrors the film’s larger questions about how people communicate across the barriers that separate them.
Toko Miura’s Misaki is a revelation of understated power. She reveals herself in fragments, and each piece of information about her past deepens both her character and her connection to Yusuke. Their dynamic avoids every expected romantic trajectory, becoming instead a relationship built on shared loss and mutual recognition.
The Chekhov text woven throughout the film isn’t decoration but structure. Uncle Vanya’s themes of wasted time, unfulfilled potential, and the difficulty of continuing to live when life has disappointed you mirror Yusuke’s personal journey with precision.
The Three-Hour Commitment
The runtime is the film’s most significant barrier. At 179 minutes, with a deliberate pace that includes long driving sequences, rehearsal scenes, and conversations that develop slowly, Drive My Car asks for a commitment of attention that many viewers can’t sustain. The film doesn’t reward impatience, and those expecting the plot to arrive on a conventional schedule will feel stranded.
The first forty minutes, which establish Yusuke’s marriage and its complications before the title card even appears, function almost as a separate short film. This prologue is essential to everything that follows, but its placement and length can feel disorienting for viewers expecting the main narrative to begin sooner.
The multilingual performance conceit, while thematically rich, sometimes creates practical confusion. Scenes where characters speak different languages to each other require acceptance of a premise that doesn’t map onto realistic communication, and not every viewer can make that leap.
Some of Murakami’s characteristic enigmatic elements, including the unresolved mystery of Yusuke’s wife’s stories, left viewers who prefer clear answers feeling frustrated by the film’s embrace of ambiguity.
Language, Loss, and the Work of Living
Drive My Car proposes that the deepest communication happens not through understanding words but through the vulnerability of performance. When actors commit to a text, they reveal something true about themselves regardless of whether their scene partners share their language. Yusuke’s journey from a man who uses Chekhov’s words to avoid his own feelings to one who finally speaks honestly mirrors the film’s argument that art and life are not separate activities but different expressions of the same human need to be known.
Should You Watch Drive My Car?
If you have the time and the patience for cinema that rewards sustained attention, Drive My Car offers an experience of unusual depth and emotional power. Hamaguchi’s filmmaking is precise and generous, giving every character room to breathe and every scene time to land. Those who need momentum, plot density, or a runtime under two hours should look elsewhere, but viewers who can surrender to the film’s pace will find a work that stays in the mind for weeks after viewing.
The Verdict on Drive My Car
Drive My Car is a film about the slow, painful work of returning to life after loss, and its three-hour runtime is essential rather than indulgent. Hamaguchi uses every minute to build connections between characters, between Chekhov and contemporary grief, between performance and authenticity, that couldn’t exist in a shorter film. Nishijima and Miura create something deeply moving from minimal material, and the final moments achieve a catharsis that justifies every patient, quiet scene that preceded them. It’s a film that drives slowly and arrives somewhere profound.