Director: Aya Igashi
This meandering story of three unhappy young women is a bit of a slog. The film’s only redeeming feature is that it is determined not to be sentimental about family. However, it is sentimental about friendship.
Miyata (Sara Minami) lives with her abusive, alcoholic mother, who, instead of saving the money her daughter earns, spends it on herself. At home after long night shifts working in a 24-hour shop and before she goes to lectures at university, Miyata is supposed to clean the apartment and cook breakfast for her lazy mother. Enaga (Fumika Baba) is recovering from being forced into prostitution by her mother. She says little and always has her head in her phone. Middle-class Kimura (Miyu Honda) tries to escape from her overbearing and overprotective mother, who rings her every two hours or so to check that she is okay. The three girls end up working in the same desolate supermarket, with each of them feeling more desperate than the other.
They all attend the same university, too, with Miyata and Kimura bonding over lecture notes. Punky Enaga is more reserved at first. She has more of a reputation, and the fact that her father killed a woman in a drink-drive accident is common knowledge to the rest of the students. The only reason why Miyata is unaware of Enaga’s family history is that she has no friends to tell her.
While Miyata and Enaga try to put distance between themselves and their mothers, Kimura sets off to find a new one in the shape of a quasi-guru that takes the three girls out of the city to a stylish religious retreat. Here, Enaga takes umbrage when she is told by the maternal cult leader that she was born to be loved by her family.
There’s a bizarre additional plot about a man who turns up occasionally to try to kill Enaga, rather overdoing the troubles that these young women face growing up in modern-day Japan. Director Aya Igashi’s message that in a cruel world, we have to create our own families as opposed to mend the broken ties that already exist is a noble one, but Love Doesn’t Matter To Me is slow, earnest and strangely melodramatic despite all its deadpan conversations.
The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2026 takes place in cinemas around the UK from 6 February to 31 March 2026.
