Cottontail

Writer and Director: Patrick Dickinson

Cottontail is a slight film about a Japanese widower, Kenzaburo, played by Lily Franky. A series of flashbacks allow us to glimpse the outline of his life, from his meeting with Akika, his future wife (an appealing, if underused Tae Kimura), through her diagnosis of premature dementia and death. Such scenes as there between these points involve Kenzaburo saying almost nothing but looking benignly thoughtful, an expression at which Franky excels. There is little backstory other than a mention that Kenzaburo is a writer, albeit an unsuccessful one, and that Akika, as a child, was taken to England by her father and fell in love with Lake Windermere. She shares a happy if somewhat improbable memory of chasing a rabbit “round and round the Lake all day long.” She continues to wear round her neck a chain with a silver rabbit.

When in middle age Akika hesitantly tells Kenzaburo of her dementia diagnosis, he seems unable to respond. She asks if, when the time comes, he’ll put her out of her misery, but he dismisses her fears, blandly reassuring her that it “won’t come to that.” Her subsequent decline is lightly sketched in, from a scene in which she has evidently run away, to a bolder, more distressing one in which she has soiled herself and becomes agitated when Kenzaburo tries to wash her.

Meanwhile in the contemporary story, Kenzaburo attends her funeral along with his estranged son, Toshi, and his wife and daughter. The presiding monk presents Kenzaburo with a letter from Akika in which she asks, as her dying wish, that he will scatter her ashes on Windermere. Next thing you know, they’re all in London from where the charmingly naïve/maddeningly stubborn Kenzaburo decides to set off on his own for the Lakes. His mobile runs out of battery early on and the journey become semi-comic, featuring some surprising turns from well-known British actors. On board a train, Isy Suttie heads a hen party who explains to Kenzaburo they’re heading for York so he needs to get off. Disembarking we know not where, he steals a bicycle and proceeds to cycle a long way in a country region which also lacks any helpful signage. Somehow he meets a kindly farmer, who – wouldn’t you know it? – turns out to be Ciarán Hinds, newly widowed (snap!) and his kindly daughter, played by his real life daughter, Aoife Hinds. They decide to drive him the hundred-odd miles to Windermere.

Eventually slowly, far too slowly, the desired spot is reached, the ashes scattered, and father and son touchingly reconciled. There is a brief glimpse – spoiler alert – of the eponymous bunny.

Patrick Dickinson directs his own script at glacial pace, presumably to point up the profound emotions that are being explored.

Cottontail is in cinemas from 14 February.