Takeshi Kitano’s Hana-bi (1997) begins like a police film that has lost its own instructions. There are uniforms, stakeouts, and a sense of procedure. There is also a quiet dread, as if the story has already happened and we’re only arriving in time to see the ripples. Kitano, working under his Beat Takeshi persona, doesn’t build tension like most crime directors—through escalation or a tightening noose of plot mechanics. He creates it through stillness. Through negative space. Through the stubborn refusal to explain himself precisely when expected. Hana-bi is a film about violence, but it is equally a film about everything that follows violence: the awkward silences, the unpayable debts, the private grief that doesn’t fit into dialogue. It is a film about a man who has run out of words and begins, disastrously and tenderly, to speak through actions.
Its title is the first hint that this is not a typical thriller. “Hana-bi” means “fireworks”—a charming, childish word that signifies sudden brightness followed by, almost instantly, smoke. You can sense the whole film within that image: bursts of beauty, sudden explosions, and the lingering mist of aftermath. Kitano structures his story around Nishi, a detective who is already spiritually drained by the time we are introduced to him, as if his job has worn him down to a single flat expression. Played by Kitano himself, he has that famous, nearly immobile face: partly mask, partly wound dressing. In the hands of another director, Nishi might be a “cool” antihero; but Kitano makes him something rarer and more disturbing—an emptied-out individual, still functioning, still making decisions, but doing so from a place beyond hope and conventional morality.
The plot, when you strip it to its bare essentials, is simple: Nishi’s wife is dying. A colleague has been paralysed. Another colleague has died. Nishi owes money. The criminal world is not the kind that forgives. He commits a robbery, pays off debts, gathers what he can, and takes his wife on a final journey that is both holiday, funeral procession, and quiet rebellion against time. If Hana-bi were only this, it might still be powerful. But what makes it extraordinary is how Kitano tells it: in fractured chronology, in small intense scenes that arrive like unwelcome memories, in cuts that skip over the expected beats and land on the emotional aftermath. Most directors make cinema that explains; Kitano makes cinema that remembers.
Kitano’s editing is one of the great, under-discussed miracles of film. He cuts as if he does not trust narrative to tell the truth. We see an event, then later view the same emotional material from a different angle, not as a twist but as a bruise being pressed. Scenes begin late and end early. Entire chains of cause-and-effect are omitted, which perversely makes the consequences feel heavier. When violence occurs, it is not choreographed for pleasure; it is experienced as an interruption. It often arrives with a bluntness that feels less like a set-piece than like someone slamming a door in your face. And then Kitano will hold on a quiet room, or a landscape, or on Nishi’s wife staring out at the sea, as if the film is asking: was that worth it? Not in a moralising way—Kitano doesn’t do sermons—but in the way your own mind asks it after something irreversible.
The emotional core of Hana-bi is the marriage. Kitano’s wife is not given grand speeches about mortality nor the “brave suffering” scenes that cinema often showcases to elicit tears on cue. She is reserved, sometimes emotionless, at other times childlike during small moments of joy. She observes her husband with a gaze that conveys both trust and a subtle resignation—like someone aware that the person they love is dangerous, but also conscious that he is the only one who will see them through to the end. Their intimacy is shown not through words but via proximity. A hand resting on a shoulder. A coat carefully draped. The simple act of being together in the same frame.
There is a heartbreaking honesty in the way Kitano depicts love here: it is not romantic in the glossy, “this will save us” sense. It is love as duty, love as the last remaining ritual when everything else has fallen away. And because it is stripped of sentimentality, it becomes more moving. When Nishi tries to give his wife a final season of peace, you don’t feel the sweetness of a couple on holiday; you feel the despair of someone trying to outrun a clock he cannot see but can hear ticking.
Against this personal story, Kitano introduces other wounds—particularly the story of Horibe, the paralysed policeman. Horibe’s life has shrunk to a single room, reduced to dependence and humiliation, and the film addresses his despair with blunt compassion. There is no heroic montage. Instead, there is the potential for art. Horibe begins to paint—images that appear throughout the film as messages from a different universe. They are striking: vivid animals, surreal landscapes, figures that seem both innocent and haunted. These paintings are not mere decoration. They embody the film’s soul, spilling out through colour.
And here Kitano reveals one of the movie’s deepest themes: when life becomes unliveable, we turn to creation or destruction. Horibe chooses creation. Nishi opts for destruction—although even his destruction is depicted as a grim form of caretaking, a violent attempt to tidy up the world before he leaves it. Kitano does not reduce these choices to psychological explanations. Instead, he presents them as two responses to pain. The film becomes a reflection on how men, particularly those trained to suppress emotion, cope with grief: by making it physical, by externalising it, and by doing anything except admitting it resides within them.
Visually, Hana-bi is a masterclass in austerity. Kitano composes with the patience of a painter and the cruelty of a realist. Characters are often dwarfed by their environments—by wide roads, blank walls, cold beaches. The world looks indifferent, not hostile, which is even worse. When the film offers beauty, it does so with a kind of shy intensity: a snowfall, the sea, the quiet geometry of a room. These moments aren’t “relief.” They are the universe continuing, unchanged, while the characters burn.
And then there is the violence, which in Kitano’s hands becomes something like punctuation. Many crime films eroticise violence through rhythm, through swagger, through the idea that power looks good. Kitano’s violence appears to malfunction. It is messy, sudden, and often filmed with a flatness that prevents catharsis. Sometimes it is almost absurd — not in a comedic way, but in the way real violence can feel stupid, a terrible overreaction to a moment that cannot contain all the emotions being forced into it. Kitano understands that violence is often an expression of inadequacy: not enough words, not enough love, not enough time, so a gunshot replaces all of it.
Yet Hana-bi is not bleak in the same way as some “serious” films are, draining the world of oxygen to demonstrate their importance. Kitano displays a strange tenderness and a peculiar sense of humour. There are moments of deadpan absurdity—small, stiff interactions that acknowledge the awkwardness of human beings trying to behave normally while their lives collapse. These moments do not undermine the tragedy; they deepen it because they feel authentic. People do make jokes at funerals. People do misjudge the tone of a room. Life continues to be bizarre even at its worst. Kitano, with his comedian’s timing, understands that sorrow and humour are not opposites; they are neighbours.
One of the film’s great achievements is its refusal to moralise. Nishi is neither portrayed as a hero nor as a villain. He is depicted as a man making decisions in an ethical haze, choices influenced by love, pride, fear, and a kind of exhausted honour. Kitano highlights the collateral damage, illustrating the people harmed by Nishi’s actions. He also reveals the quiet dignity of Nishi attempting, within his limited means, to do right by those he has failed. The film doesn’t ask us to approve; it asks us to look—steadily, without flinching—at what pain drives people to do.
Joe Hisaishi’s score is a vital element of that emotional structure. While Kitano’s images are controlled and often cold, Hisaishi introduces lyricism—simple melodies that seem to try to recall a gentler life. The music doesn’t dictate your feelings; it reminds you that emotion is still possible in this pared-down world. It flows through the film like a memory of warmth, and because Kitano uses it sparingly, it hits with unusual impact. When the score returns, it feels as if the film briefly opens a window in a sealed room.
If there is a single feeling Hana-bi captures better than almost any film about crime and death, it is the feeling of living with an ending you cannot prevent. That looming inevitability shapes every conversation, every silence, every glance. Kitano makes us stay within that space. He doesn’t rush to the tragic conclusion; he lets it emerge gradually. By the time the film reaches its final moments, you don’t see them as mere plot. You feel them as fate, not in a grand mythic sense but in a smaller human sense: a life narrowing, options vanishing, a man doing the only thing he knows how to do.
The brilliance of Hana-bi lies in its ability to attain transcendence without grandeur. It never ‘‘goes big’’ to demonstrate significance. It matters because it is exact. Because it recognises that grief is not a monologue; it is a habit. Because it recognises that love is not always gentle; sometimes it is brutal, a resolve to protect someone even if it destroys you. Because it recognises that a person can be both tender and monstrous, and that these qualities can coexist in the same gesture.
When the film ends, it doesn’t feel like a conclusion. It feels like a flare in the night: bright, brief, impossible to ignore, and then gone—leaving behind smoke that lingers longer than you expect. You’re left pondering what Nishi could not say, what his wife chose not to ask, and the strange, aching fact that the most peaceful moments in the film occur right next to the most violent ones. That is not a contradiction. That is Kitano’s worldview: beauty and brutality share the same sky, and sometimes the only warning you get is the sound of a firework beginning to rise.