Suzume (Locks the Door)

Suzume is a movie about the process of grief. Suzume (Nanoka Hara) is a girl who lives with her Aunt Tamaki (Eri Fukatsu). One day on her way to school Suzume meets a mysterious young man named Souta (Hokuto Matsumura). Souta is looking for ruins, Suzume gives him directions but then thinking again decides to follow the young man instead of continuing on her way to school. It doesn’t say how long it takes to get to these ruins, but given how teenagers plan to arrive at school basically on time I’m sure this deviation should have had more consequences than it did. Suzume is unable to find Souta in the ruins, at one point even recognizing her behavior is unusual and stalkerish. She does find a strange door, and a cat statue.

Suzume gives up and hurries off to school with seemingly no problems of being late. At lunch she is looking out the window and sees a dark cloud coming from the hillside. Tremors happen, a minor earthquake, the worm gets bigger. Her classmates cannot see the worm and she rushes back to the ruins. She runs all the way to the strange door she found which appears to be the clouds origin. Souta is there trying to shut it. Suzume helps him shut it and has him follow her home to bandage his injury and explain what had happened.

While Souta is at Suzume’s home a cat named Daijin (Ann Yamane) appears at Suzume’s window. Daijin turns Souta into a chair. The adventure begins. Suzume must look into her past and learn a lot about the woman she wants to be. She meets many people interested in helping her along the way. Her Aunt helps her on the last leg of the journey and they deal with their shared grief of losing a mother, a sister, and the life they had envisioned for themselves up to that point.

The movie is several metaphors, beautifully melded into the story of one girl. There is how close we always are to life and death. There is the metaphor of the earthquakes, and turbulent rains when the “worms” (as Souta told Suzume the dark clouds that come out of the doors is called) get loose and unleash natural disasters. The worms that come through open doors of human emotion and tragedy. At the end when the current crisis has come to a close, there is a vision of the land not becoming quite whole this time, it leaves a scar. Just like our grief, even when dealt with leaves a scar, and natural disasters leave scars on the land. In order to close and lock a door Souta and Suzume have to think of the people who lived in the place they are at; they have to feel the emotions they felt and hear the echoes of their voices. They say:

“O divine gods who dwell beneath this land. You have long protected us for generations. Your mountains and rivers we have long called our own, they are not ours by right, we claim them no longer. I return them to you!”

I think that this speaks to our divine need to protect the land for future generations. This movie takes us through denial, pain, anger, depression, the work of reconstruction, acceptance and hope. It is an emotional rollercoaster that is absolutely worth the ride. While I did watch this with my children, and it is a family friendly movie, it was clear my children could not fully understand the movie. The did very much like the character or Daijin. I would encourage any family who wants to open a discussion about grief or the process in it to try to watch it as a family.