The premise sounds like a stunt on paper — a whole movie about a man who cleans public toilets for a living — and the film spends almost no time trying to convince you otherwise. Instead it just watches Hirayama do his job with the same care he brings to everything else in his day, and Kōji Yakusho plays that care so precisely, through posture and small expressions rather than speeches, that the mundanity stops registering as mundane about twenty minutes in.
Wenders builds the film's emotional life through repetition with small variation: the same drive to work, the same cassette tapes (Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Otis Redding), the same patch of sky photographed through the same tree, each day just different enough to notice the differences. It's a structure that asks for patience rather than plot, and it pays that patience back with an accumulated warmth that a more incident-driven film couldn't reach.
A movie about a toilet cleaner's daily routine that ends up being one of the calmest, most attentive films about being alive.
Nothing dramatic really happens, by design, and a niece's brief visit near the end is the closest the film comes to a plot turn. That restraint is the whole point: a life built around noticing light through leaves and doing an unglamorous job with dignity, offered without irony or condescension. Good counter-programming for anyone worn out by movies where everything has to matter.
The project began as a commission: a Tokyo nonprofit associated with the city's public-toilet renovation initiative approached Wenders to make something showcasing the facilities' architecture, and he and Takasaki built a fictional narrative around that starting point rather than making a promotional piece. The entire film was shot on location in Tokyo in Japanese, a first for the German director working at feature length, with a tight sixteen-day handheld shoot that kept the production close in spirit to the unhurried life it depicts.
Perfect Days premiered in competition at Cannes in 2023, where Yakusho won Best Actor and the film took the Ecumenical Jury Prize, before going on to an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature as Japan's submission. Critics widely praised it as a return to form for Wenders, drawing comparisons to his earlier observational work, and it became one of the best-reviewed films of its festival year — a quiet, low-budget production that outlasted flashier competition in year-end critics' lists.
The toilets Hirayama cleans aren't set decoration — they're real, part of Tokyo's Nippon Foundation-backed Tokyo Toilet Project, which commissioned seventeen architects, among them Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban, Kengo Kuma, and Toyo Ito, to design showcase public restrooms across Shibuya. Wenders was originally approached to make a handful of short promotional films about the project and proposed a feature instead, working several of the actual structures into Hirayama's daily route. NEON picked up Perfect Days for US distribution and released it in February 2024, and the film went on to gross roughly $26.8 million worldwide — a career-best box office total for a Wim Wenders film by a wide margin. It's a rare case of a commissioned promotional project turning into one of a veteran director's best-reviewed films in decades.
