Let's be realistic.

Fantastic!

Brilliant and touching

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This is NOT a horror film. When a decades long missing boy returns to his mother a ministry official is sent to investigate. Soon more dead people begin to return to their loved ones.What is the nature of longing, of human needs and of mourning. What would you do if that person you've missed finally came back? These are some of the questions that this intriguing movie raises.Sentimental.touching. heartwarming, harrowing, contrived and yet completely and almost compulsively watchable. Think of it as something similar to Field of Dreams but not just for guys, or going into that purely sentimental direction.This is a one of a kind film that really should be seen

I bought the DVD of Yomigaeri entirely because of Takeuchi Yuko ("Be with you", "Heaven's bookstore"), whose smile is guaranteed to brighten up any miserable day. I then discovered that the director is Shiota Akihiko, who made the controversial but most interesting Moonlight Whisper. Yomigaeri is not in the least controversial, but equally interesting.The title "Resurrection" tells a little, but not everything, about the movie – a scary ghost tale? a clever hoax? a science fiction yarn? Interesting that the genre in which IMDb placed this movie is "Fantasy". If I were to choose, I would say "romance".The movie starts with a bit of a red herring, with the first two resurrection scenes (the pop musician couple and the little boy) looking like the beginning of scary ghost stories. The mood soon shifts to science fiction, with an investigation team showing up and cases becoming commonplace. Before we get to the middle of the movie, however, we realize that the focus is really on the human stories, with human dramas unfolding.The resurrections are on deaths ranging from a long time ago to very recent. On the one hand, we see the little kid coming back to a mother who is now over 80, a mother coming back to a daughter who is now about her own age (i.e. when she died of childbirth) and a teenager coming back to an adult younger brother. On the other hand, we have a husband who died only three years ago, and even a high school student walking right into his own funeral.As we follow these various stories, we see that it is not all rejoices, as people, both those coming back from death and their beloved ones and friends, find it awkward, and even painful, to cope with the change. There is also a clever twist, about two third into the movie, which you would recognize as soon as you see it.The movie is beautifully shot, both in the literal visual sense and in its being tender and touching. The premises are interesting, and quite well tackled even though not in great depth. As there are quite a few stories and many characters, the stars Takeuchi Yuko and Kusanagi Tsuyoshi (of SMAP, Japan's most popular boy-band) do not get the screen time all to themselves. Still, we see a reasonable amount of them, and they are beautiful, individually as well as together.

Maybe it was the physical situation I was in, strapped into a bucking 'plane, on my way from my loving family to a family reunion, but this made me cry non-stop. I watched this in total darkness, straining to read the subtitles off a tiny in 'plane "entertainment unit". My brother, sitting next to me, without any of the emotional baggage (his "family" is less "loving" than mine!) kept asking me what was the matter! The twists and turns in the storyline should reward the most demanding mystery fan. The power and passion in the love story should satisfy the most romantic. I watched this three times in four flights, and it gave me everything I needed, every time I watched it. Now I've just got to convince a local company to provide me with a DVD!!

This is actually a very nice movie with good actors, a very imaginative plot and some great cinematography. But the extremely melodramatic music made some scenes almost impossible for me to take them serious, although this definitely is a serious movie about love and death. A bit more humor would have helped to increase the overall impression, though.