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James Marsh

3/5 stars
The acronym CODA (Child Of Deaf Adults) should be familiar to many film-goers, thanks to the Academy Award-winning 2021 film of the same name.
While Mipo O’s Living in Two Worlds is not a direct remake, this Japanese drama owes a huge debt to Sian Heder’s lauded predecessor, as it charts the strained relationship between a young male CODA and his hearing-impaired parents.
Both films are set in remote fishing communities, where a deaf couple become increasingly reliant upon their able-bodied offspring to help them navigate daily life.


While the protagonist in CODA reaches an emotional crossroads when these obligations hinder her dreams of becoming a singer, her Japanese counterpart Dai (Ryo Yoshizawa) openly resents his family and stubbornly abandons them to pursue his dreams in the big city.
From the moment Dai hits puberty, he goes from a helpful son to being embarrassed by his parents and their disability.
After flunking high school, he leaves immediately for Tokyo, where he works a number of dead-end jobs before eventually becoming a writer.
Only after connecting with a deaf community in the city, and interacting with other CODAs, does he finally begin to see the error of his ways.
Director Mipo O does explore the struggles of communicating via speech and sign language, and laudably casts deaf actors Akiko Oshidari and Akito Imai as Dai’s parents.

She gives notable screen time to characters who use Japanese sign language, and even highlights regional variants in signing that betray Dai’s rural background, in the same way somebody’s accent might reveal where they are from.
In this respect, Living in Two Worlds succeeds in championing marginalised people in a country where prejudice against the physically and mentally impaired persists.
However, these aspects of the film are largely overshadowed by Dai’s persistently unsympathetic behaviour. This is a stark contrast to Heder’s film, which was buoyed by its warm-hearted, endlessly optimistic characters who refused to be held back by their circumstances.

Dai’s inherent unlikeability is a significant roadblock, especially when he only appears to find redemption through a clumsily tacked-on last-gasp flashback.
The film might have benefited from focusing more on the doting, mutually supportive relationship between Dai’s mother and father, so pivotal to the family’s daily happiness yet largely sidelined in Takehiko Minato’s script.
As it stands, Living in Two Worlds does little more than highlight a genuine problem, before insisting that CODAs like Dai – rather than society at large – are the ones responsible for fixing it.
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Where Oscar winner CODA was warm-hearted, Mipo O’s film makes its child of deaf parents in Japan so unsympathetic he is hard to root for


Where Oscar winner CODA was warm-hearted, Mipo O’s film makes its child of deaf parents in Japan so unsympathetic he is hard to root for.


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Review | Living in Two Worlds movie review: Japanese CODA counterpart suffers from unlikeable lead

Where Oscar winner CODA was warm-hearted, Mipo O’s film makes its child of deaf parents in Japan so unsympathetic he is hard to root for