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Part of me wishes the WWII-set Wife of a Spy (2020), Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest movie, had gone by a different title. It somewhat sullies a tense, prolonged leadup where the main character, Satoko (Yū Aoi), realizes something is up with her import-business owner husband, Yūsaku (Issey Takahashi); appoints herself an amateur investigator to find out just what; and, like the heroines at the center of Hitchcock movies like Suspicion (1941) or Shadow of a Doubt (1943), hopes whatever is revealed is easier to stomach than the many worst-case scenarios crafted paranoically in their heads. Yet even if the movie’s title is spoiler-y, it doesn’t do too much, aside from neutralizing some of our shock, to diminish the effects of a twisty and methodically ambiguous movie good as both a thriller and a domestic drama. 

Kurosawa is best known for his work in horror; he’s perfected over the years a detached-feeling, atmospheric creepiness that has earned comparisons to David Cronenberg. Though Wife of a Spy might on paper sound like a departure for the filmmaker, he doesn’t altogether file his horror sensibilities away. Kurosawa often prefers to plant his camera a few yards back from the characters, keeping the lens still enough to recall an unfeeling surveillance camera or spookily calm voyeur. He usually only goes for a close-up during confrontational moments — when closeness feels most dangerous. We feel, usually, like we’re watching something we aren’t meant to. And when presenting war-specific horrors — military-sanctioned torture, bombings, ethics-shirking experimentation — he practices the unflinching exactitude of a surgeon, persevering through ugliness as a way to underscore it. (The script, which he co-wrote with Tadashi Nohara and Ryūsuke Drive My Car Hamaguchi, is coldly matter-of-fact about Japan’s wartime atrocities.)

It’s eventually understood that Yūsaku is not a spy per se but an unaffiliated person interested only in giving the public a fuller sense of his country’s cruelty (particularly toward Manchurian civilians, which he’s captured on camera). He never, though, becomes that much more than a mysterious figure whom Satoko quests to figure out and maybe never will. 

Like those earlier mentioned Hitchcock movies, Kurosawa is most invested in his heroine’s point of view, and how she squares deceit dealt by a man who has taken advantage of her trust. Aoi’s affecting performance evocatively nails how much her world has been shattered by the fundamental discovery of deception. The subsequent investigation is Satoko’s attempt to pick up the pieces, only half-confident they won’t be knocked from her hands again.