It is oddly encouraging that a film like Ryuya Suzuki‘s “Jinsei” — not that there are many films like Ryuya Suzuki’s “Jinsei” — should be released within weeks of “The Odyssey” and “Disclosure Day.” Those two 2026 tentpoles are unalike in most ways, except that each will be the product of hundreds of people moving heaven and earth, starry casts and astronomical budgets at the behest of inordinately famous and commercially successful filmmakers, in order to elicit from us viewers the merest sigh of wonder. Telling the sparse and spiky story of a century in the life of a taciturn J-pop idol, “Jinsei” is crowd-funded, cost-efficient and hand-drawn by its self-taught debut writer-director-editor-composer. It is the opposite of a prestige Hollywood blockbuster primed to manufacture astonishment on an industrial level. But if this is the Summer of Awe, the visionary “Jinsei” belongs right there alongside them.  

Much of the wonderment it inspires comes from the radical disparity between the lovely simplicity of its aesthetic and the sprawl of its intricate, century-spanning story. The lines are clean and sharp, the palette muted, approaching grayscale (which makes later splashes of color, like in the gaudy decor of a talk show or the blood-rust-red of a post-apocalyptic sky, pop even more), and motion within the frame is kept to a minimum. Instead, composition is everything, as in a dizzying prologue which, in the space of a few wordless minutes, gives us a meeting, a parental estrangement, a courtship, a marriage, a birth, a divorce and a sudden, shocking death, all delivered as vignettes glimpsed through the windscreens of a series of cars.

Already now, Suzuki’s sui generis breadcrumb-trail storytelling is in evidence, and it’s a mark of his sharp-eyed and razor-edited intelligence that while a lot of the time we might feel like we’re guessing at otherwise unstated connections between characters and scenes, almost always, those guesses turn out to be correct. Suzuki’s instinct — so unusual in a first-time filmmaker — is to trust the less-is-more adage, to remove all unnecessary connective tissue, thereby giving us the pleasure of puzzling the elegantly enigmatic “Jinsei” together for ourselves.    

The birth in the prologue is that of Se-chan (voiced by rapper Ace Cool), though as we’re informed early on, he will not go by that name for long. As a young boy he witnesses his handsome but dissipated father Eito’s descent into alcoholism, his parents’ separation and his mother’s relationship with a new man, Hiroshi (Shohei Uno). And then, in the first of quite a few sudden eruptions of violence (there will later be a stabbing murder, an attempted rape, an assassination by gunshot, several severe beatings and a refrain of potential vengeance in the shape of a kitchen knife wrapped in newspaper), Se-chan’s mother is killed and Eito rendered comatose when an elderly farmer accidentally plows his truck into the convenience store outside which they’re chatting. Se-chan watches the whole thing happen from the back of the car, while Hiroshi looks on helplessly from the driver’s seat.

Traumatized into silence, the de facto orphan stays living with the kindly but guilt-ridden, grieving and impecunious Hiroshi. At school he’s bullied and nicknamed “The Grim Reaper” — one of ten different aliases he will go by over the ten decades of his life, and which provide the film’s ten chapter titles. But then in graduation year, another outcast, Kin (Taketo Tanaka), arrives and the pair bond over their shared fascination with Japanese pop-idol culture. In Se-chan’s case this is influenced by his discovery that his deadbeat dad Eito was himself once the celebrated frontman of J-pop band Blue Boyz. They had been the biggest money-spinner for shady impresario Shiratori (Kanji Tsuda), who now believes Se-chan has enough of his dad’s charisma to follow in his footsteps. And so the overriding themes of “Jinsei” (“Life”) are established: identity, celebrity, and paternity, and the ways in which the pursuit of any one of those can interfere with or overshadow the others.

But Suzuki is barely getting started. He uses the frame in endlessly inventive ways — shifting aspect ratio, alternating panels and at one point delivering a whole nightmarish sequence in negative, like it’s been rendered on scraperboard — so that sometimes it feels like we’re whipping at ravenous speed through the pages of an exquisitely well-drawn graphic novel. And given the sheer amount of story here, and the apparent simplicity of style, the level of detail is astounding. There is always time to observe the tightening of a fist or an overturned beetle struggling on its back.

Se-chan and Kin do indeed become boyband members, but Se-chan quits before they make it big. From here, his story veers into increasingly surreal territory. He variously becomes a gigolo, a local-folklore God and an earthquake-rescue hero before again trying his hand at idol-dom. This time, it sticks and he attains massive fame as a singer and a blockbuster movie star. He falls in love, as much as so dissociated a man ever can. And after the film’s biggest conceptual leap, when it shifts to 2050 after a war has decimated Japan and VIP survivors live in an underground cult, waited on by floating robots, Se-chan finds himself in yet another cage from which he needs to escape.

It’s hard to overstate just how peculiarly uncompromised Suzuki’s vision is, as though it was designed for maximum resistance to the forces of homogenization that make almost everything look at least a bit like something else. So there is little to compare “Jinsei” to. Don Hertzfeldt occasionally comes to mind for a similarly pervasive mood of questioning, philosophical melancholy. The deeply weird, completely silent futurist finale, which we infer is the result of a side character’s stated ambition to invent a longevity device, has faint echoes, in its metaphysical eeriness, of the star-baby sequence in Kubrick’s “2001.” But mostly, “Jinsei” is magnificently singular: intensely personal, wildly hypothetical and so thrillingly new it feels it might itself have come from some version of the vividly strange future it imagines.