Loneliness does not begin when we are left alone. It begins when we long to be known, but fear what it means to be seen. And therein lies its cruel paradox—the more alone we feel, the harder it becomes to risk the vulnerability required to break free—a contradiction that Yukiko Sode’s All the Lovers in the Night gives form to, extending beyond its protagonist to encompass those who cross her path.

The film opens on Fuyuko Irie (Yukino Kishii), a freelance proofreader, hunched over a manuscript at her desk. Around her, papers and books have accumulated with the hours and dispersed across the space. This scene soon becomes familiar—Fuyuko spends much of her time at the same desk, working her way through one manuscript after another. In fact, this scene seems to account for much of Fuyuko’s life. In a conversation with a fellow proofreader and one of her only friends, Hijiri Ishikawa (Misato Morita), Fuyuko reveals that since leaving her previous job to freelance, she has spent most of her days at home. She does not watch television, drink, or go out and outside of proofreading, there is little else that fills her days. Strangely though, Fuyuko does not seem particularly troubled by the life she has built. Her isolation does not appear to be something imposed upon her, nor does she appear especially eager to escape it. For a while, she seems almost content to let her days pass in this way.

Soon enough, however, Fuyuko finds her own way of coping with the isolation that has come to define her life, turning to alcohol almost impulsively at first, then routinely. Sode’s treatment of drinking becomes increasingly significant throughout the film—not simply as a means of dulling what Fuyuko feels, but as a temporary escape from the hyper-awareness that keeps her at a distance from others. As Fuyuko drinks, the boundaries of her carefully monitored self begin to loosen—she speaks more freely, feels more openly, and perhaps most importantly, becomes willing to risk being seen. Alcohol gives her access to a vulnerability she cannot quite reach sober, a feeling that may be familiar to anyone who has ever felt themselves retreat beneath their own self-consciousness, and wished, even briefly, to forget themselves in the presence of others.

It is through this newfound coping mechanism that Fuyuko also crosses paths with Mitsutsuka (Tadanobu Asano), a physics teacher in his fifties, who encounters her sick after a day of drinking. Their chance meeting opens Fuyuko to the possibility of a friendship—or perhaps even romance. They begin meeting every so often for coffee, where their conversations turn to the physics of light. Without revealing too much, Sode makes their connection feel, at first, like an answer to the isolation each has carried alone. Yet, beneath the possibility of intimacy, both remain shaped by loneliness in ways that neither can simply resolve through the other.

All the Lovers in the Night is a film ultimately concerned with Fuyuko’s struggle to move beyond the confines of a life she has, in many ways, built for herself. Adapted from the award-winning novel by Mieko Kawakami, Sode takes a deeply introspective story about loneliness and transforms it into a visual language of stillness. Fuyuko sits alone in her apartment, working, thinking, waiting; sometimes, nothing much happens at all. Yet it is within these stretches of tranquility that the film finds its most honest expression of isolation. 

The film also repeatedly returns to the setting of Fuyuko’s apartment, where her drinking gradually becomes a recurring visual motif. At first, Sode shows us the act in full—Fuyuko pouring alcohol into her cup or bottle before drinking. As the film progresses, however, the pouring itself becomes omitted from the frame, leaving us without the visual cue that once distinguished alcohol from water. With it, the distinction between the Fuyuko we see sober and the one we see after drinking begins to dissolve. What began as a way for Fuyuko to step outside herself has become indistinguishable from the life she returns to each day.

One of the film’s strengths, however, is that Fuyuko’s story is only one thread in Sode’s broader portrait of womanhood. Her path intersects with an extroverted colleague who has no trouble navigating romance, and a childhood friend who is married with children. Yet neither offers the uncomplicated version of womanhood they might initially appear to represent, in which one is judged for having too many lovers and the other is overwhelmed by motherhood and trapped in an empty marriage. Sode is not simply presenting different forms of isolation, but exposing the impossibility of a perfect version of womanhood waiting on the other side of Fuyuko’s solitude. There are only different ways of discovering that the life you have is not necessarily the life you were promised.

Ultimately, the film lives in the prospect of something more––the possibility of romance, of friendship, of allowing yourself to become vulnerable enough to be known by another. Yet Sode offers no cure for loneliness, because she never treats it as something so easily cured. Instead, All the Lovers in the Night suggests that connection can offer only what it ever can: not an easy escape from solitude, but rather a momentary interruption of it.

All the Lovers in the Night screened as part of the 74th Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) from the 13th and 21st of August.