On the visual language of grief in Hirokazu Kore-eda's filmography and why he handles it better than almost anyone.

Kore-eda's subject is the family as a site of both sustenance and damage. His films — Still Walking, Like Father Like Son, Our Little Sister, Shoplifters — return obsessively to the same territory: people who love each other and have failed each other, living together with the weight of that dual truth.

What distinguishes his handling of grief from most filmmakers who work in this territory is patience. Kore-eda's characters do not articulate their feelings. They cook, they eat, they drive, they sit in rooms together. The emotion is communicated through behavior rather than speech, and the camera — always relatively static, always attentive to small physical details — is the instrument of that communication.

The recurring image in Still Walking is food. The mother prepares an elaborate meal every year on the anniversary of her eldest son's death, in a house that no longer contains his presence. The meal is both a ritual of grief and a refusal of grief. The camera watches it being prepared with the same quality of attention that the family brings to not talking about what they're feeling.