Hirokazu Kore-eda's adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto's one-shot manga begins as a story about artistic jealousy and becomes something harder to name. Fujino, a confident 13-year-old celebrated in her class for her yonkoma strips, is stopped cold when a homeroom teacher introduces work by a housebound classmate named Kyomoto. The confrontation is specific: Fujino's manga is about faces and story; Kyomoto's is about background, about the weight of empty rooms. One is drawing; the other is seeing. That distinction drives the entire film. The friendship that follows is one of those rare screen partnerships where collaboration is rendered as something genuinely erotic in its intensity — not romantically, but in the root sense: the pulling of two people toward the same thing with the same hunger. Fujino makes the foregrounded story and characters; Kyomoto makes the world those characters move through. Together they win prizes and commissions at a momentum that older artists can only watch. Kore-eda frames this with the precise, undemonstrative camera work he's always used for domestic intimacy, but here applied to the intimacy of shared artistic ambition. Then Kyomoto quits. She wants to go to art college, to learn more, while she still has the humility to. The rupture between them is the film's pivot — Kore-eda is explicit that it matters more than any romantic breakup — and what follows is a sliding-doors reverie that asks what Fujino could have changed, what she would have said differently if she could reach back into the past and redirect events. The answer the film arrives at is not comforting. What Kore-eda seems to understand, and what makes this film unusual, is that the 'looking back' of the title is not just grief. It is the mechanism of art itself — the retrospective imposition of form and meaning onto experience that could not be understood as it happened. Fujimoto's original manga was understood as a meditation on the 2019 Kyoto Animation arson attack that killed 36 people, and while Kore-eda does not foreground that context, the film carries the weight of irreversible loss without flinching from it. The performances across the age-gap casting are clean and unshowy. The visual register stays faithful to the panel-based grammar of manga without being slavish about it — there are moments where the film moves like pages turning, time folding, sequences replaying with small, terrible differences. It is the kind of formal choice that could collapse into gimmick but here serves the argument the film is making: that looking back is authentic and vital, and also that it changes nothing, and that artists do it anyway.
