I went into this completely blind on the recommendation of someone in a previous thread here. I came out of it needing to sit quietly for about twenty minutes.

Wim Wenders made something genuinely rare: a film about contentment. Not happiness — contentment. Hirayama, the protagonist, is a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. His days are structured, simple, repetitive. The film watches him move through these days with a patience that could read as boring and instead reads as profound.

A few things that stick with me:

The tree photographs. He photographs the same tree over weeks from roughly the same angle. The variation is minimal. He does this like it's important. It is.

What gets left unsaid. His backstory is implied in fragments — a wealthy family, an estrangement, a choice made long ago. The film refuses to make drama of it. It was his life. He chose this one.

Komorebi. The Japanese word for the interplay of light and leaves. The film keeps returning to shots of light through trees. Hirayama smiles at it every time. So did I by the end.

Not a film for everyone. But if you've felt the particular burnout of modern life, it's worth the 124 minutes.