On how Hirokazu Kore-eda's Like Father Like Son (2013) handles a moral dilemma that most films would simplify.

Like Father Like Son follows two families who discover, when their sons are six years old, that the hospital switched the babies at birth. Both families have raised children who are not biologically theirs. The film is structured around what they should do.

The conventional film made from this premise would resolve into a clear answer: biological connection matters most, or chosen relationship matters most. Kore-eda refuses this resolution.

What the film actually examines is a specific kind of successful Japanese masculinity — the father who works constantly, provides materially, and cannot bridge the emotional distance between himself and his son — and what happens when that man is confronted with a child he has failed to know.

The film's argument is not about nature versus nurture. It's about the kind of father a man chooses to become and whether that choice can be made after six years of making a different choice. The ending is honest in a way that the premise's resolution-hungry structure might have precluded, had Kore-eda been a less disciplined filmmaker.