Review of Drifting Home (2022)
Seen in 2023.
An old apartment building has been cleared for later demolition. Children playing in it suddenly find the entire building afloat on the open ocean.
The high-concept premise of this children’s adventure film is extraordinarily poor. It marries the familiar premise of The Drifting Classroom (1972), spiced up with a little bit of Japan Sinks (1973), to the playground myth of a ghost haunting a danchi, the sort of multi-storey concrete block that went up all over Japan in the postwar decades. It never gels. The characters and their relationships are stereotypical, with a creepy focus on unsympathetic leads. The visuals are not bad, but not impressive.