The two families are the Onos and Suzukis, who are produce and dairy farmers whose lives are uprooted after an earthquake causes a nuclear meltdown nearby. Although the government evacuates the Suzuki family to a shelter, the Onos are told to remain where they are because their property was deemed safe due to being only inches away from the government designated nuclear meltdown danger zone. The Land of Hope explores how the various members of the Ono and Suzuki family respond to the chaos wrought by the nuclear accident.
What reminds one of the Coronavirus outbreak are chilling, intimate scenes in The Land of Hope of people trying to lead normal lives in the midst of a deadly environmental disaster; the pregnant wife Izumi Ono (Megumi Kagurazaka) shops for groceries in a full hazmat suit, the elder Yasuhiko Ono (Natsuyagi) cares for his dementia suffering wife Chieko (Naoko Otani) by himself while living right next to the nuclear poisoned zone, the young couple Mitsuru Suzuki (Yutaka Shimizu) and Yoko (Hikari Kajiwara) wander through the eerily deserted and destroyed wasteland of the nuclear meltdown.
Indeed, The Land of Hope is very much about the will to survive and bring about a semblance of normalcy to ones' life while a society is falling apart everywhere. Most of Sion Sono's films are about outsiders who refuse to fit into the norms of everyday society, while The Land of Hope is about people trying their best to rebuild a society to its original roots. However, if one digs a little deeper, Sono may be using a natural disaster as a means to destroy the current society and rebuild it based on new values. It's no coincidence that the younger members of the Suzuki family are more willing to let go of their home and start a new life, while the elder Yasuhiko stubbornly refuses to leave his property even though it will inevitably be destroyed by the nuclear disaster.
While Sion Sono's earlier films like Love Exposure and Tokyo Tribe are filmed in a wild and hectic manner verging on inspired anarchy at times, The Land of Hope is startlingly restrained and constructed in a much more traditional manner. Scenes are allowed to play out naturally and without the use of rapid cuts or camera movements, and Sono is more interested in exploring intimate depictions of domesticity and quiet human interaction than splashy outbursts of cinematic lunacy.
It isn't until the last act of The Land of Hope that Sono starts employing some of his more avant-garde techniques, with the use of disarming instrumental music and rapidly cut scenes of death and destruction, but until then Sono holds back his more outlandish tendencies. However, The Land of Hope ends on a note of optimism and renewed faith in the general goodness of human nature, something which we don't see too often in a Sono film.
Although it's not as much discussed as his more bonkers films, The Land of Hope is a refreshing change of pace for Sono. The Land of Hope is one of Sono's most humanistic films, as it explores the notion of hope and familial love as opposed to his darker and more nihilistic films about the baser side of human nature, such as Strange Circus, Guilty of Romance, and Cold Fish. Sono uses a fictionalized account of the Fukushima nuclear accident to reveal how human nature can transcend even the most intense forms of suffering. Like Martin Scorsese did with Silence, Sono is taking a break from his usual more frenetic fare to tell a contemplative tale of faith and survival.
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