Drive My Car

Yūsuke Kafuku is a stage actor and director who has spent two years unable to come to terms with the death of his wife, Oto, a screenwriter. He accepts an invitation to stage Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at a theater festival in Hiroshima, a job that comes with a condition: he is not permitted to drive himself, and a young woman named Misaki Watari is assigned as his chauffeur. Reserved and quiet, Misaki ferries him between rehearsals and his lodgings, and over the hours they spend together in the car, the two slowly begin to speak honestly about their pasts and the losses each has carried. The film is based on a short story from Haruki Murakami's collection Men Without Women.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Takamasa Oe. It followed his 2018 film Asako I & II and shares its release year with Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which came later in 2021; his subsequent features include Evil Does Not Exist and GIFT in 2023. Hidetoshi Nishijima plays Kafuku, Toko Miura plays Misaki, and the cast also includes Masaki Okada, Reika Kirishima, Park Yu-rim and Jin Dae-yeon.

Made for about 1 million USD, the film went on to earn roughly 15 million USD worldwide, a substantial return on its modest budget. On IMDb it holds 7.5/10 from about 76,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 7.4/10 from a much smaller pool of around 1,568 votes. A critics' rating of 8.7/10 across 216 reviews places it well above both audience scores, indicating stronger enthusiasm among professional reviewers than among general viewers.