“A work of genuine conviction made by an artist who has lived his politics.”

“A sunflower, even when cut down, still stands upright.”

Escape, the latest work from veteran Japanese director Masao Adachi, tells the story of Satoshi Kirishima, a member of the revolutionary East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, which was responsible for a series of corporate bombings during the 1970s. With Escape, Adachi has made a fiercely introspective film about revolution and how escape itself becomes a form of struggle. For him, there is no true escape from systems of power, history, or guilt. It’s a remarkable late-career work that feels like both a culmination and a renewal of one of Japan’s most radical cinematic voices.

Adachi, now in his eighties, has been making films for over fifty years. Across fourteen features, his career has consistently merged art with revolutionary activism. He’s perhaps most known for his collaborations with Kōji Wakamatsu, especially their 1971 co-directed manifesto The Red Army/PFLP Declaration of World War. Adachi’s films are always revolutionary in both form and content. His last film, Revolution+1, dramatized the assassination of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, suggesting that political violence may, in some instances, emerge from systemic desperation. For decades, Adachi has been Japan’s most outspoken cinematic agitator, unafraid to question the state’s legitimacy and the illusions of social order.

With Escape, Adachi continues that lifelong project but turns his gaze inward, toward aging, reflection, and the toll of a life spent running. The film’s narrative follows Satoshi Kirishima, a relatively low-ranking member of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front’s “Scorpion” cell. The group waged symbolic attacks against corporate structures, hoping to avenge those oppressed by Japan’s capitalist system and imperial legacy. They named their enemies as Emperor Hirohito, capitalism itself, and the exploitation of the Ainu, Ryukyu, and formerly colonized peoples of China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. But when the group’s “Wolf” cell botches a bombing operation, killing several civilians, the entire network collapses. Members are captured and some ingest cyanide rather than face arrest and questioning. Kirishima alone manages to disappear.

To hide and escape, Kirishima cuts his long hair and determines he must learn how to hide his smile, the smile that appears on every wanted poster. His disappearance becomes his new form of existence. He moves between construction sites, working as a day laborer, first as “Yoneda,” and later settling into a more permanent position under the name Hitoshi Uchida. Japan’s booming construction industry provides him anonymity as the workers live and eat on-site, and he doesn’t need to go back to his previous house or life. It becomes a metaphor for capitalism’s ability to absorb even its most radical dissidents, as it can transform revolutionaries into functionally invisible cogs who must submit to the system.

Young Kirishima is played by Rairu Sugita, who gives a magnetic but quiet performance. Sugita captures the naïve fire of early conviction and the idealism of a young man who hasn’t yet read Marx or Lenin but believes change can come through lived experience and direct action. In one early exchange, a comrade tells him that books are secondary, and the fieldwork is the text.

But Escape isn’t confined to the 1970s. Roughly halfway through the film Adachi splits the narrative, introducing a second timeline with Kirishima at seventy, still living as Uchida and suffering from terminal stomach cancer that cannot be cured. Portrayed with heartbreaking subtlety by Kanji Furutachi, the older Kirishima still works at the same construction company, still eats alone, and still listens to the same rock music that once fueled his youth. His existence has become a rhythm of repetition and an endless exile from both society and his true self as he constantly ruminates on the past. These two timelines of youthful rebellion and aged regret merge. In several extraordinary sequences, the younger and older Kirishima appear together, conversing across time. Their dialogues become ghostly meditations on conviction, failure, and revolution.

The older Kirishima’s sections center on existentialism. He visits Buddhist temples, and he ruminates on his past radicalism, his compromises, and on how his living in constant hiding is his own form of endurance and revolution. “Chanting mantras will not erase sins,” he says, referring to his inability to bring back the lives of the innocents who died in the bombings, and perhaps also to his life which ceased to exist after the mistake of the Wolf brigade.

The film’s modest production values enhance its power. The low-budget aesthetic feels not like limitation but like principle. Adachi’s rejection of cinematic polish is itself anti-capitalist; Escape looks and feels like a film built for revolution rather than for commerce. The result is an intimacy and an honesty very few large-scale productions could achieve.

The film’s score, a fusion of rock and jazz, adds liveliness and vibrancy to every moment. The use of guitar recalls both youthful rebellion and decayed nostalgia, echoing revolutionary soundtracks of the 1970s. For me, Escape feels stylistically aligned with Heinz Emigholz’s The Last City, which also uses direct camera observations and similar music to create a highly captivating narrative.

Adachi also incorporates archival footage, grounding the revolution within the broader history of Japanese and global violence. Initially, these clips document the Wolf cell’s failed bombing in the 1970s. Later, the footage expands to include the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, the 1995 Tokyo subway attack by the Aum Shinrikyo, the bombings in Palestine in the 2000s, and the 2011 Great Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The montage links political extremism with the human condition of continued suffering without respite over a 50-year period. Adachi’s message is clear in that systematic oppression never disappears.

Escape undoubtedly remains a highly political film, and is in striking conversation with Paul Thomas Anderson’s recently released One Battle After Another, about how it is to be a revolutionary, about how people age and must deal with their past ties, and how they can and must continue in life. These films don’t initially seem like counterparts, but they may be the most alike and potent films of our current time.

The film’s final act is both political and transcendental. As Kirishima lies dying in the hospital, forty-nine years after going into hiding, he finally reveals himself to the authorities as Satoshi Kirishima. It’s less of a confession than a liberation. He wants to free himself from his lifetime in hiding and to be his true self once again. In the scene immediately following this, Kirishima meets all his former comrades of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, who appear as ghosts. He finally can join them. The scene is highly moving as Kirishima never had a family, and this is the closest he can be to having true and deep relationships with anyone else.

Escape might appear modest beside Adachi’s early works, but it carries the same wisdom and sorrow. It’s a film about the erosion of conviction under the weight of time, about how even radicals grow old, and how ideology must eventually confront mortality. Like Revolution+1, the film is certain to stir controversy, especially for its sympathy toward those that society deems terrorists. But Adachi’s cinema has always resisted moral simplification. His characters aren’t heroes or villains. In an era when political filmmaking often feels sanitized or overly simplified, Escape stands as something rare. It’s a work of genuine conviction made by an artist who has lived his politics, and it’s a haunting and moving film, one that insists revolution is not a historical event but a lifelong condition.