What a brilliant start to our new season, with one of the most positive response to any film we’ve shown since we began inviting audience feedback. Only In Darkness and Nebraska have scored higher.
There were 23 feedback response slips returned after the showing of this film. The breakdown from these slips were as follows: Rating: 
- ‘Excellent’: 17 vote
- ‘Very Good’: 6 votes
- ‘Good’: 0 votes
- ‘Satisfactory’: 0 votes
- ‘Poor’: 0 votes
Feedback comments for “Like Father, Like Son”.
As ever, we are always interested to receive any additional comments people may have on this film.
Once again, Hirokazu demonstrates an extraordinary ability at directing, and getting the best out of, young children. I thought, however, that the adult leads gave a better performance than in last year’s “I Wish”.
The story was sensitively handled, and gave quite an insight into the moral dilemmas facing people suddenly confronted with the reality that the child they have nurtured was not their own. On the one hand not wanting to lose the child they’ve raised, on the other (given the differing values/privileges between the two families) the feeling that their own flesh and blood was not being raised properly. In the recent case of the American couple who found their baby had been swapped, the mother expressed a willingness to raise both children, it is easy to sympathise (whilst not necessarily agreeing) with Ryota considering a similar resolution.
I have to agree with the feedback comment that the film was somewhat marred by the “Hollywood Ending” – would Keita really have been so quick to forgive the father who had given him away. The emotional scars would take far longer than 1 year to heal.