For a film preoccupied with the mechanics of light, Yukiko Sode’s All the Lovers in the Night unfolds mostly in shadow — in the muted glow of a Tokyo apartment window at sunrise or in empty city streets walked at midnight on a birthday no one else celebrates. Adapted from Mieko Kawakami’s celebrated novel, the Japanese filmmaker’s quietly transfixing fourth feature uses the halting rhythms of a first, awkward romance to pose expansive philosophical questions: how does the self become visible, and how much of what we feel is genuinely our own?

Premiering in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar, All the Lovers in the Night came to Sode by way of her producer, who handed her Kawakami’s book — her first encounter with this particular novel, despite being a longtime fan of the author’s work.

“My interpretation of the book was that it was about light,” Sode tells The Hollywood Reporter. “And of course, as a filmmaker, light being a motif was an irresistible challenge. How could I not make it?”

The story follows Fuyuko (Yukino Kishii), a freelance proofreader who lives a near-monastic life of urban anonymity: long days of solitary work in her quiet apartment, occasional outings with her one outgoing colleague, Hijiri (Misato Morita), and a single, annual self-indulgence — a midnight walk through the city on her birthday. But Fuyuko’s inner life is not nearly as placid as her self-effacing exterior suggests, and the cracks begin to show when she mysteriously takes up the habit of heavy, surreptitious day drinking. The subtle sea change in her life begins to build when she meets Mitsutsuka (Shōgun star Tadanobu Asano), a reserved high school physics teacher, at a local culture center, where she’s considering taking a class. He speaks in a gentle, almost cryptic register, responding to her questions about the subject he teaches with gnomic musings on the counterintuitive mechanics of light. A series of hesitant café meetings ensues — but even as a genuine connection begins to take shape, each carries secrets they don’t know how to reckon with and reveal.

Kawakami — whose All the Lovers in the Night was the first Japanese novel shortlisted for the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award — granted Sode and her team complete creative freedom, declining to submit notes or requests at any stage. “She basically said, it’s in your hands,” Sode recalls. The novelist offered just one observation when the two first met to discuss the screenplay: that the book was a decade old and could require at least a little updating for verisimilitude — thus, Sode inserted a passing reference to AI and its potential impact on the plight of the professional proofreader.

What she preserved, most of all, was the novel’s philosophical undercurrent. Light, as Mitsutsuka gently expounds, becomes visible only when it strikes against an object. So too, the film suggests, do our deepest selves. “You have yourself, you have the object of your affection,” Sode says. “But truly to get close to them — what does that mean?” Fuyuko, meanwhile, is haunted by a question close to that of any artist: are her thoughts and feelings genuinely her own, or are they merely quotations of things she has already read, already absorbed? Amid her quiet desperation, she justifies her withdrawal from social life by believing that it’s at least a form of authenticity — call it the Anxiety of Influence as daily living practice.

Sode says this theme also exhilarated her as she was drafting the screenplay of the adaptation, which came out relatively effortlessly.

“This motif also felt so familiar to me as a filmmaker,” she notes. “Whenever you’re shooting a film, you’re not quite sure if you’re drawing on some accumulation of the cinema that came before you, or if you’ve actually struck upon something original.”

These twin preoccupations — light and authenticity — guided Sode’s formal choices for the film. She was adamant about shooting on 16mm, and her producers, budgetary concerns notwithstanding, eventually relented after the film’s entire cast and crew joined in her appeals for clearance to use the analog format.
“When you shoot on film, you can capture light on physical film as is,” Sode explains, “whereas if you’re using digital, it might become too washed out, or you lose that quality of feeling that you really see it.”
The 16mm choice also reinforced what she calls the film’s “analog” ethos — a quality embodied in her proofreader characters, whose finicky, intensive labor sits in contrast to the vacuous convenience of the AI age. Cinematographer Yasuyuki Sasaki, who also shot Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s visually accomplished, Cannes-premiering latest Kokurojo: The Samurai and the Prisoner, renders Tokyo in painterly half-light: lambent neon, late-afternoon spaces, smudgy city stoplights.

Sode’s visual strategy also extended to the way her camera translates Fuyuko’s anxious interiority from Kawakami’s first-person novel.

“Apart from Mitsutsuka, you see her with other male characters always sitting sideways, or not really sitting face forward — which, of course, means that she’s holding herself back and not engaging with them 100 percent,” she explains. With Mitsutsuka, the framing across the cut-backs of their conversations gradually tightens and shifts to eye level — formalizing Fuyuko’s slow opening-up, as she inches toward vulnerability.

The film’s delicate thematic architecture is anchored by two standout performances from its stars. Kishii — who broke through internationally as a deaf boxer in Sho Miyake’s Berlinale favorite Small, Slow But Steady — plays Fuyuko with an exquisite, wary inwardness. Asano, the Japanese arthouse favorite whose recent Golden Globe win for Shōgun introduced him to broader Western audiences, brings his usual appealing peculiarity to Mitsutsuka, working from a character backstory he constructed on his own. “Boy, was it unexpected,” Sode says of the original story Asano created for Mitsutsuka as part of his method. “I’m afraid I really don’t think I should share what it was,” she adds, laughing.

Threaded through All the Lovers in the Night is a portrait of a particular contemporary Tokyo type, Sode says — the solitary thirty- or forty-something urbanite who has built a life of emotional self-protection so well fortified that it precludes the usual, natural desires for romance or family-making.

“The metropolis allows people to blend in and to disappear within it,” she says. “If you choose not to associate with anybody and just live your life, that means there’s less possibility that you’ll be hurt. But at the same time, we as people, as humanity, cannot exist without others — and so there is that yearning, that longing as well.”

For all the film’s quiet sorrow, Sode insists Fuyuko’s arc resolves into something like grace. Her solitude was always a private mythology of specialness — and what she trades by the end is self-defense for a more authentic identity.

“Whether her love has been fruitful or not,” Sode says, “Fuyuko, by virtue of having experienced a romance, is able to say she is one of the many, many people around the world who have experienced a great love. So in a way, she’s found nakama — companionship — in a community where everybody feels a little bit alone.”