Hamaguchi Ryusuke embraced an unusual turn in his ascendant career by accepting an invitation from his Drive My Car collaborator—Japanese musician and composer of that film’s moody score, Ishibashi Eiko—to invert their working relationship, with his composing images for her music, performed live. The result is a melancholic ecological tone poem that places music before word, and that at times recalls Stan Brakhage in its invocation of daily life in rural, snowy woodlands. Using carefully measured intertitles instead of spoken dialogue, GIFT also draws openly from the silent cinema of Hamaguchi’s avowed idols—Murnau, von Sternberg—whose stark, expressive imagery he also channels. Like the great dramatists of the silent era Hamaguchi builds drama with calibrated efficiency that builds to a remarkable climax. Hamaguchi chose to follow GIFT with a longer sound version and expansion of the same story that would become his award-winning Evil Does Not Exist.

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