General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

First Love (2019 film)

First Love (Japanese title Hatsukoi, 初恋) is a 2019 Japanese-British crime film directed by Takashi Miike, telling an original story set over a single night in Tokyo in which a young boxer and a call girl become entangled in a failed drug deal between the yakuza and a Chinese triad.¹^•² It was selected for the Directors' Fortnight section of the 72nd Cannes Film Festival in 2019.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director / screenplay	Takashi Miike; screenplay by Masaru Nakamura, an original story¹^•²
Countries / languages	Japan and United Kingdom; Japanese and Mandarin (Chinese)²
Runtime	108 minutes per IFFR, IMDb, and Rotten Tomatoes; the Japanese Film Database lists 115 minutes²^•³^•¹
Festival premieres	Directors' Fortnight, 72nd Cannes Film Festival (2019); North American premiere at Toronto International Film Festival 2019 (Midnight Madness); IFFR 2020¹^•⁴^•²
Lead cast	Masataka Kubota as Leo, Sakurako Konishi as Monica, with Nao Omori, Shota Sometani, Becky, and Jun Murakami¹
Key crew	Cinematography Nobuyasu Kita; music Kôji Endô; editing Akira Kamiya²
Release	Japan February 28, 2020 (Toei); United Kingdom February 14, 2020; United States limited September 27, 2019¹^•³^•⁵
Reception	98% Tomatometer from 121 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes; Metascore 77 from 25 reviews⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot and characters

The story takes place in Kabukicho, the red-light district of Shinjuku. Katsuragi Leo (Kubota Masataka) is a destitute professional boxer with no family who has just been told he has a brain tumor. He encounters Monica (Konishi Sakurako), a call girl and cocaine addict whose parents got her hooked on drugs, and the two are dragged into the feuds of yakuza gangsters, a corrupt cop, and the Chinese mafia after a drug deal goes wrong.¹^•²

The ensemble around the two leads includes a corrupt cop, guileless gangsters, bloodthirsty femme fatales, and a one-armed contract killer.² Other named roles include Gondo (Seiyo Uchino), Otomo (Nao Omori), Kase (Shota Sometani), Juri (Becky), and Ichikawa (Jun Murakami).¹ The Toronto International Film Festival program described the script by Masaru Nakamura, a frequent Miike collaborator, as weaving its hyperbolic characters toward a thoughtful expression of the concept of hatsukoi, first love.⁴

Production

The film is a co-production of Toei Company, Recorded Picture Company, and OLM, Inc., with HanWay Films handling international sales.² Producers include Muneyuki Kii, Jeremy Thomas, and Misako Saka.² The Toronto program credits Nobuyasu Kita as cinematographer, Akira Kamiya as editor, Takeshi Shimizu as production designer, and Koji Endo as composer.⁴

The International Film Festival Rotterdam catalog calls the film the 103rd feature of Miike's career and describes it as a nostalgic love letter to the 1990s, most reminiscent of his Black Society trilogy but with a contemporary twist.² The Japan Times reviewer Mark Schilling read it as an entertaining throwback to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Miike was making low-budget, ultra-violent, blackly comic yakuza films, while noting that it is more polished than his early work and filled with familiar Miike tropes.⁷

Release and box office

After its Cannes premiere in Directors' Fortnight in May 2019, the film had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and was released in limited US theaters on September 27, 2019.¹^•⁴^•⁵ It opened in the United Kingdom on February 14, 2020, and in Japan on February 28, 2020, distributed by Toei.³^•¹ Well Go USA Entertainment was the North American distributor.⁴

IMDb records a gross of $218,329 in the United States and Canada and $5,848,555 worldwide.³

Critical reception

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 98% Tomatometer from 121 reviews and an 88% audience score; the site's critics consensus says its blend of violence, comedy, and romance is just another wildly entertaining entry in Miike's filmography.⁵ Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 77 based on 25 reviews.⁶

Reviewers singled out the film's pacing and tonal mix. Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times praised Miike's breathless momentum and narrative clarity despite the large cast, and noted that by the director's standards the gore is fairly restrained.⁸ Simran Hans of The Observer gave it 4/5 and highlighted Kôji Endô's thundering jazz-rock score.⁵ Tony Rayns, writing in Sight and Sound, was more reserved, judging the gangster strand a less-energised rehash of Miike's earlier yakuza-versus-triads film Shinjuku Triad Society (1995).⁹ Nick Allen at RogerEbert.com found the stunt-driven plotting busy to the point that its spectacle became superficial, though he noted the film's comic-book flourishes, including a switch to cartoon-style animation for an impossible car stunt.¹⁰^•⁹

Place in Miike's career

Miike, born in Osaka and a graduate of the Yokohama Vocational School of Broadcast and Film, had already directed dozens of theatrical and video features including Fudoh: The New Generation (1996), Ichi the Killer (2001), 13 Assassins (2010), and Yakuza Apocalypse (2015) before First Love.⁴ The British Film Institute's London Film Festival brochure noted that after his 100th feature, Blade of the Immortal (2017), he had completed three further productions, and that First Love employs a love story as a counterpoint to the intrigues of the Tokyo underworld.¹¹ At the 50th International Film Festival of India in 2019, Miike said that for a long time many Japanese films centered on yakuza gangsters, and that audiences can only take a message from a movie based on their own experience.¹²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026