Shoplifters Review

Kore-eda withholds the legal facts for most of the running time so you are forced to judge the household on behavior alone: the shoplifting routine run as a father-son ritual with hand signals, the grandmother's pension quietly funding everyone, croquettes shared on a cramped floor while the adults talk over each other. Ryuto Kondo shoots the house in long lenses that stack bodies into every frame, so intimacy reads as physical crowding. The one image the film gives itself is the beach day, shot largely from behind as the grandmother mouths a thank-you nobody hears.

Then the structure inverts and everything is reclassified as a crime. Sakura Ando does the film's heaviest lifting in a single interrogation, wiping her eyes with a knuckle and asking what you call a woman who takes in a child she did not give birth to, and the scene is good enough to lift a merely fine film into something you carry around. The last act delivers its revelations through a run of expository interviews, which is a flat way to land it. The final balcony shot is not flat at all.