Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is not merely a film it’s a pilgrimage. Adapted from Haruki Murakami’s short story, this three-hour meditation on loss, art, and the unspoken spaces between people unfolds with the patience of a confessional and the precision of a stage play. It is a masterpiece of restraint, where the most profound emotions are hidden in glances, pauses, and the hum of a red Saab’s engine.

At its core, this is a film about language both its power and its inadequacy. Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima, in a performance of devastating subtlety) is a theater director who communicates through Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya but cannot voice his own grief. His young chauffeur, Misaki (Toko Miura), speaks even less, yet their shared silence becomes its own dialogue. The car a confined, intimate space becomes a stage where unhealed wounds are slowly, painfully revealed.

Hamaguchi’s direction is unhurried but never indulgent. Scenes linger just long enough to let meaning settle, like dust after a long drive. The film’s structure layered with rehearsals, multilingual performances, and fragmented memories mirrors the way grief resists linear storytelling. Even the recurring motif of Uncle Vanya feels less like a theatrical device and more like a haunting a ghost that refuses to leave.

If there’s a flaw, it’s that Drive My Car demands surrender. Its runtime and pacing will test some viewers, and its emotional climaxes are so quiet they risk being missed entirely. But for those who yield to its rhythm, the payoff is transcendent. The final act doesn’t offer catharsis so much as a quiet acknowledgment that some losses never leave us, but we learn, slowly, to carry them.