The Depressed Girl
Chiaki’s dead,
comes a quiet voice from the other side of the table. Ichika’s eyes search for sympathy, but Kana doesn’t understand a word. Chiaki… which Chiaki?
Chiaki Sano?
Ichika replies. We were in the same class.
The curly-haired one?
Ichika nods. What happened?
I don’t know. She didn’t leave a note.
She killed herself?
Yes. With a door handle, at her parents’ house. She used her Mac charger.
Was the cable long enough?
No idea.
The moment I first spotted the film’s poster in Shimokitazawa, I knew I had to see Desert of Namibia. Kana’s profoundly empty gaze—I wasn’t entirely sure whether it reminded me more of myself or of certain people from my earlier life. A lack of empathy seemed to have been widespread both in my hometown and in my heart. And even today I catch myself wearing that same empty, expressionless look of complete indifference on my face—even when I’m among people I actually like.
Desert of Namibia premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize and made Yoko Yamanaka, at 27, the youngest woman ever to receive the honor. It’s a prize that feels both apt and slightly beside the point. Desert of Namibia is precisely the kind of film that prizes were invented for: formally daring, emotionally unruly, and stubbornly, almost defiantly, itself.
Yumi Kawai plays Kana with an authority that immediately commands the screen. She’s 21 years old, employed at a laser hair removal salon in Tokyo, and perpetually on the edge of some unnamed outburst. She drifts between two men—Honda, a dependable real estate agent who cooks her meals and keeps the household intact with patient, almost desperate affection, and Hayashi, a free-spirited artist whose charisma masks a capacity for cruelty that mirrors her own. She doesn’t choose between them so much as move between worlds, carrying her restlessness like weather.
Yoko Yamanaka, who made her debut feature Amiko as a teenager in 2017 on a budget of roughly $2,500—a fifth of which reportedly went toward repairing a car she totaled driving to the shoot—has grown into a filmmaker of uncommon assurance. Where her debut crackled with the quick-cut energy of a YouTube vlog, Desert of Namibia holds. It lingers. It zooms, slowly and with maddening patience, onto a face that gives little away. Shot in a boxy 4:3 format by cinematographer Shin Yonekura, the film has the claustrophobic texture of a life lived in small rooms: hair removal cubicles, cramped kitchens, the narrow hallways of shared apartments.
This formal restraint is not mere affectation. It mirrors Kana’s own condition. She’s a young woman surrounded by men—professionally, romantically, medically—who cannot quite hear her, even when she’s screaming. When Honda returns from a work trip having visited a hostess bar at his boss’s insistence, their subsequent confrontation is rendered with scorching honesty: the apologies that pile up and begin to mean nothing, the moment Kana’s quiet fury curdles into something physical and irrational, the way the film refuses to adjudicate between victim and perpetrator. They’re both, somehow, both.
The film’s also, intermittently, very funny. Kana’s workplace scenes at the salon—where she and a colleague speculate freely about why an elderly woman is getting a bikini wax, or where she’s fired for informing a customer that she’s been wasting her money on cosmetic rather than medical hair removal—have the rhythm of sketch comedy, the timing of absurdist theater. A role-play argument in which Kana coaches her boyfriend on how to refuse his boss’s advances at a hostess bar gives way, without warning, into something genuinely unsettling. The tonal whiplash is intentional, a structural analogue to the instability that defines Kana’s inner life.
Midway through the film, Kana visits a therapist. The session’s one of the most acutely observed psychiatric consultations in recent cinema: the doctor’s careful probing, Kana’s sudden tangent into a hypothetical about pedophilia as a philosophical example, the awkward moment when she asks the therapist to dinner. A potential diagnosis of bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder is floated but not confirmed. Kana’s desire to understand who she is comes closest to a thesis statement in the film, delivered so quietly it could easily pass unnoticed.
The film’s final stretch tips into something stranger and more surreal: a kind of waking dream in which panda ants, campfire songs, and parallel universes intrude upon the social realism of what came before. Some viewers will find this tonal leap liberating; others will feel the ground go out from under them. Yoko Yamanaka earns neither entirely, and the film’s last act is its least controlled. But there’s something right about the incoherence. Kana, in the end, cannot be resolved into a diagnosis, a lesson, or a character arc. She simply continues, which is exactly the point.
Yumi Kawai’s performance has been compared, with some justification, to Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence. The comparison is generous but not absurd. Like Gena Rowlands, Yumi Kawai makes suffering look like electricity. Her Kana won the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Actress in Japan and received nominations at both the Asia Pacific Screen Awards and the Asian Film Awards, and every honor is deserved. She carries the film on a performance that never condescends to her character, never asks for sympathy on her behalf, never explains her to us.
Desert of Namibia isn’t a comfortable film, and it doesn’t want to be. But it announces Yoko Yamanaka as one of the most necessary voices in contemporary cinema: a filmmaker capable of holding contradiction with the same uneasy, unflinching attention she turns on her impossible, essential heroine.