It's a beautiful thing when a director is confident enough to take his time telling a story, and Shinji Aoyama is not a man to rush things. A brother and a sister and a bus driver are the only people left alive after they and their fellow passengers are taken hostage by a young nihilist. What follows is essentially a road movie as the survivors find themselves drawn back together, united in loss and a sense of displacement. The greatness of the film lies in its movement forwards. Just as the characters are struggling to move on, so the film feels stuck in a slow whirlpool. The bus trip they embark on feels not only essential to keep the characters moving (there is of course no destination), but also to keep the film going. With strong elements of Terrence Mallick, Wim Wenders' early films (The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty Kick, Alice In The Cities) and the new wave of Scandinavian melancholy humanist movies (like Aki Kaurismaki's The Man Without A Past), this is well worth watching if you like your movies slow, thoughtful and beautifully shot.