Out (Japan, 2002)
Directed by: Hideyuki Hirayama
Starring: Mieko Harada, Shigeru Muroi, Naomi Nishida, Teruyuki Kagawa

If you ever suspected that women were better than men this movie puts that theory in the lab and proves it. Four middle-aged women are leaky boats on a sea of troubles, and there’s nothing life can do between now and the time they die that’ll surprise them.

They¹re clock-punchers at the local box lunch factory and their home lives are just as drab: downsized husbands, sullen children, senile in-laws, mountains of debt and maxed-out credit cards. If their husbands aren’t blowing through their savings on ill-fated gambling sprees, they’re beating them up or getting arrested for shoplifting. And then hugely pregnant Yayoi kills her husband and suddenly there’s a dead body that has to be dealt with. Well, packing up a dead body shouldn¹t be much harder than packing up a box lunch, right?

Hilariously unexpected, dealing out genuine doses of "what happens next?" suspense, this flick is charged by the fact that it deals with what other movies ignore: money. Most movies give their stars fabulous jobs that require no actual work, meals that pay for themselves, and credit cards that are never maxed out. OUT is obsessed with money: getting it, spending it, owing it, saving it, and trying to rake in more of it. Money makes the world go round, and OUT is into the filthy lucre up to its elbows.

The four female leads giving electrifying, immediate performances. Sadly, three of them would be put on the shelf in Hollywood as "over the hill" and "unemployable", but let¹s face it: these actresses are at the top of their game and they put their younger colleagues, on both sides of the Pacific, to shame.

Graceful and mature, hilarious and suspenseful, OUT is a movie driven by its story. You can feel the whole audience lean forward, wondering what happens next, drawing closer to the movie screen as if it’s a campfire on a dark and starry night. Lives starting over, female bonding, corpse disposal: what movie could tell a better story than that?