Ueda Shinichiro, the director behind cult zombie hit “One Cut of the Dead,” has turned his attention to a very modern form of storytelling with his new feature “Earthlings in Love.” The film, showing in the Nippon Cinema Now section of the 39th Tokyo International Film Festival, takes the vertically shot, social-media-friendly microdrama — and expands it into a full feature.
Earthlings in Love (Credits: Variety)
It is a fitting next step for a filmmaker who has built his name on self-reflexivity: films about filmmaking, and about how the act of making something changes the people making it. “One Cut of the Dead” remains his calling card, a beloved cult film that continually transforms as it unfolds — from a single-take horror-comedy into a meditation on the act of filmmaking itself, and then into the chaos of actually being on set.
From One Cut of the Dead to Earthlings in Love
“One Cut of the Dead” (2017) became a sensation far beyond its tiny budget. Made for around ¥3 million with a cast of unknowns, it opened in a small Tokyo cinema for a six-day run before word of mouth turned it into a global festival hit, passing two million admissions in Japan and screening at dozens of festivals worldwide. Its famous 37-minute opening single take — a no-budget film crew shooting a zombie film, only to be invaded by the real thing — is only the first layer. The film then rewinds to show how that chaotic take came together, turning a horror-comedy into a warm, funny tribute to scrappy, collaborative filmmaking.
That interest in how filmmaking influences us is exactly what Ueda brings to “Earthlings in Love.” Where “One Cut of the Dead” examined a traditional film shoot, the new feature looks at the microdrama: short, vertical videos made for phones and social media, a format that has exploded in popularity but rarely gets the feature-film treatment.
Why a Microdrama Feature Matters at Tokyo Film Festival
Microdramas are built for speed and vertical screens — bite-sized episodes designed to be watched on a phone, often in a single sitting. Turning one into a feature is a creative gamble: can a form made for scrolling hold a cinema audience? And what happens to its intimacy and immediacy when it is blown up to festival-screen scale?
Those questions sit naturally in Ueda’s wheelhouse. His work has always asked what is real and what is performed, and how the camera changes behaviour — whether that camera belongs to a film crew in an abandoned building or to a phone in someone’s hand. By bringing a microdrama into the Nippon Cinema Now section at Tokyo, Ueda is treating a format many dismiss as disposable as worthy of serious cinematic attention.
For audiences who discovered Ueda through “One Cut of the Dead,” “Earthlings in Love” offers a familiar promise: a film that starts with a clever formal idea and uses it to say something larger about how we make — and watch — stories now.
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Source: Variety — read the full story there.
