The film opens with death and refuses to look away. From there, it strips everything from two children, their home, their parents, their dignity, their food, until what remains is so unbearably small that watching them try to survive becomes an act of witnessing something sacred being destroyed. This is not entertainment that comforts you. It is a film that makes you complicit in indifference, then spends 88 minutes showing you exactly what that costs.

Two children find themselves alone in rural Japan as World War II nears its end in 1945. Seita and his four-year-old sister Setsuko have lost their mother, their father and their home to the war, and now drift across the countryside with nowhere to go. The siblings scrounge for food and shelter in an indifferent world that has little patience for two orphans. Hunger and illness close in, and even kind adults grow cold under the pressure of hard times. What unfolds is a quiet, devastating portrait of survival stripped to its rawest elements. Seita and Setsuko possess almost nothing, yet their bond and youthful hope hold firm against relentless hardship, and the film stays with them as their circumstances grow ever more fragile.