Follow young boxing-champion-turned-Buddhist-monk, Yoshinobu Fujioka, on a hypnotic journey through nighttime Tokyo. The monk’s earnest search for the meaning of life is poetically set against the gritty back alleys and complex, dark characters he encounters. He hears confessions from all quarters—an inmate in a woman’s prison, patrons of his own establishment, Monk Bar, a man in an abandoned restaurant, and in a home for aging geisha, where an otherworldly, heavy-lidded figure delivers a stunning karaoke performance, sending the lyrics to “Tokyo is no longer mine” crying out into the night. With gorgeous cinematography and a dreamlike voiceover, Pirjo Honkasalo, the award-winning director of The Three Rooms of Melancholia, brilliantly blurs the line between reality and fiction. DP