Boy
A family of four lives off of scams in which they pretend to be injured by automobiles.
Critics Sentiment
Toshio's little brother unwittingly causes a real fatal car accident in Hokkaido
The Omura family moves repeatedly across Japan to evade detection
The film's biggest swing is from the slow, numbing drift of the family's nomadic middle section (score 6.5) to the sudden, precisely edited shock of the little brother causing a real fatal accident in Hokkaido (score 8.5), a shift of 2.0 points that reviewers identified as the film's most powerful dramatic rupture.
Boy opens with strong critical engagement around its morally charged premise and Oshima's radical formal language, sustains a mid-film plateau of bleak but admired realism occasionally undercut by emotional distance and slow pacing, then rises sharply at the Hokkaido climax where the film's accumulated dread crystallizes into its most praised sequence. The documentary-style arrest ending divides viewers slightly but is broadly respected as a formally bold conclusion to a film that reviewers found painful, exquisite, and consistently thought-provoking.
Crew
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