What do people watch when no one can stop their minds from wandering? In 2026, the biggest growth story in entertainment is the micro-drama: serial "snackable" two-minute content made to be consumed by phone. Having taken off in China, the minimalist new form is now globally popular. Unsurprisingly, much of it is made by AI. Just as predictably, Hollywood is getting onboard.
And yet, given the law of equal and opposite, audiences also crave something more. Witness Kokuho, a near-three-hour Japanese movie centred on the classical theatre of kabuki. The scale is epic, the look lustrous, the pace measured. We might even call it maxi-drama. In Japan, the result has been commercial rocket fuel -- the most successful domestic live-action film in history. The box office take there passed ¥20bn ($130.8 mn) earlier this year.
Fittingly, perhaps, the movie is a period piece, unfolding between 1964 and 2014. The opening scene is a New Year's banquet, hosted by a Nagasaki yakuza. A rival mob attacks. Amid blades and chaos, the gangster soon lies dead in a blood pool in the snow; a perfect match for the white face and red lips of a kabuki heroine. (Fans of yakuza ultra-violence should not get their hopes up for more.)
Out of tragedy, a star is born. The gangster's orphan son, Kikuo, is adopted by a famous onnagata: an actor in the centuries-old tradition of male kabuki performers playing women. The actor already has a son, Shunsuke. What follows is a multi-decade saga of serpentine fate, as both boys grow up into celebrated onnagata. (They are played as adults by Ryo Yoshizawa and Ryusei Yokohama.)
Director Lee Sang-il gives the film the elemental notes of kabuki itself. There are rivalries and reunions, betrayals and reversals, dizzying professional highs and lows. It all winds up interwoven with excerpts from kabuki plays such as The Love Suicides at Sonezaki. Structurally, the movie can feel like a jukebox musical. Let's be clear: Kokuho is a much better film than, say, Bohemian Rhapsody. But if there the songs are the main attraction, here mesmeric stretches of kabuki -- eerie and exacting -- are an equal partner of everything else.
Yet Lee is also good on life behind the scenes. Early on, we see the relentless training of an onnagata and, with it, the weird inner tension of the role: the raw effort spent contorting the male body into hyper-stylised femininity. (Intriguingly, neither Kikuo nor Shunsuke seems concerned with the psychology of swapping genders. What weighs on them is ambition and tradition.)
Kokuho says interesting things about actors, here forever sharp-elbowed and thin-skinned. But then, what fascinates Lee is the human, physical nature of performance. The film was Oscar-nominated for Hair and Make-Up, a category the industry can sniff at, but one that in the era of AI seems a beacon of hands-on craftsmanship. And the movie makes a showpiece of the grand theatres that host Kikuo and Shunsuke, all glowing balconies and sky-high ceilings.
Honestly, Kokuho can be a slow burn. But it also has the depth of flavour you only get from a serious investment of time. (Shūichi Yoshida's 2018 source novel ran to 800 pages, written after years of research as a kabuki stagehand; Yoshizawa and Yokohama spent a year and a half studying the form.)
The result makes quite the rebuttal to AI slop and micro-dramas -- a story steeped in thousands of hours of creative labour, about the whole life it can take to achieve excellence. Two minutes might be enough for some. Movie lovers play a longer game.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from May 8
