….
It wasn't out of defiance, but genuine disinterest in other people's metrics for who she was allowed to care about.
The story never let the audience get distracted.
The summer trip was next - a getaway that Sakura had orchestrated with the kind of cheerful bulldozing that Haruki had long since stopped trying to resist.
And it was genuinely fun to watch.
Light and warm and full of the kind of effortless banter that made the audience forget, for entire stretches, that this was a film about a girl who was dying.
The two of them exploring, arguing over nothing, eating too much, navigating the small awkwardnesses of two people who hadn't yet figured out what they were to each other.
It was, admittedly, almost too sweet for anyone watching alone. The kind of intimacy on screen that made every single person in the audience briefly and painfully aware of their own solitude - the quiet, involuntary thought of I want that followed immediately by I don't have that - before the film pulled them back in and made them forget again.
But underneath the sweetness, laughter and the sunlight and the comfortable silence - the film was doing something deeper.
It was building emotional architecture that the audience wouldn't fully recognize until it collapsed on them later.
Especially during the hotel scene - Truth or dare.
On paper, it was a game.
Two teenagers in a hotel room, killing time, being silly.
But the way Regal shot it, and how he let the camera linger just a beat too long, the way the lighting shifted almost imperceptibly, the way the score pulled back until there was nothing but their voices and the hum of the air conditioning–
It didn't feel like a high school drama anymore.
The audience could feel their own heartbeats in their ears.
The stakes, which should have been nonexistent, just two kids playing a harmless game - suddenly felt like those of a suspense film.
Every question carried a landmine beneath it. Every answer was a door that, once opened, couldn't be closed.
It was masterful.
The kind of tension that couldn't be manufactured by explosions or chase sequences - only by two people sitting three feet apart, terrified of what honesty might cost them.
….
And after the trip, it wasn't smooth sailing either.
There was a scene - later, weeks later, in Sakura's room, where the film did something that Noel did not expect.
Sakura, sitting cross-legged on her bed with the casual ease of someone who had made peace with things no one should have to make peace with, said:
"Remember my list of things I want to do before dying? This is part of it. Doing something naughty with someone who's not my boyfriend and who I'm not in love with. I don't mind if it's with you."
She crossed to him, hugged him - long, and deliberate, her face pressed against his shoulder.
"The naughty part." she said quietly. "Is coming up."
The film held this, five seconds… Six, and the theatre was completely, unnervingly still.
Elliot did not move, his face was doing something the camera caught only from an angle - not readable, or a reaction that could be named. Just a person processing something without a vocabulary for it.
Then she pulled back and laughed. "Just kidding!" Wide eyes. That grin. "The mood got all serious because you wouldn't say anything! Did I make your heart race?"
He didn't answer.
She tilted her head. "What are you thinking?"
He still didn't answer.
Then - slowly, without warning, without explanation, he put his arms around her and held on… and then pushed her on the bed.
She went still. "Wait, what's up? Let me go, it hurts. Are you playing along with my joke? That's unusually nice of you. But you can let go now–"
He didn't let go.
She was quiet for a moment, then, louder: "Give it a rest! Do you think it's okay to do something like this to a girl?! Let me go! Stop! Stop already!"
He dropped off the bed letting her get back. Something in her face that wasn't quite what her words said it was.
"Stop." she said.
The theatre was silent. It was a breathless silence of people who had just watched something crack open and didn't know what had spilled out.
….
Then came the aftermath on the road.
Elliot had been punched, hit square in the face by a boy who told him to stay away from Sakura, who accused him of hovering around a girl who deserved better, who reduced everything between them to something possessive and territorial and small.
And standing there - lip split, dignity in pieces, the sting of someone else's anger still radiating through his jaw, Haruki finally said the thing he had been holding inside for weeks.
That they shouldn't have met.
That it was all a coincidence - a random accident in a library that spiralled into something neither of them had planned for.
That she would have been better off without him in her life.
It was devastating to watch.
Two people standing on a sidewalk, trying not to hurt each other while hurting each other with every word, trying to keep things afloat while the water kept rising - trying to navigate a situation that had no map, precedent or clean resolution.
But somehow, through patience, through stubbornness, through the kind of grace that only comes from two people who refuse to give up on each other even when giving up would be easier, they made it work.
Everything was starting to go well after this scene…
Not perfectly, there were difficulties, misunderstandings, and small fractures that had to be addressed and repaired and addressed again.
But the trajectory was upward. The audience could feel it - that fragile, hard-earned equilibrium that comes after two people have fought through the worst of it and come out on the other side still standing, together, and choosing each other.
The film was breathing, and then it stopped.
….
The climax.
Elliot was supposed to meet Sakura at a café.
A simple plan - the kind of ordinary, unremarkable arrangement that two people make when they've finally reached a place where ordinary feels like enough.
He waited, and she didn't come.
A minute passed, then an hour and a few more hours passed… The camera stayed on Elliot, his face and the empty chair across from him, and on the slow, almost imperceptible shift from mild annoyance to confusion to something he couldn't yet name but the audience already could.
Something was wrong.
The entire theatre felt it - a sudden, collective unease that settled over the room like a change in atmospheric pressure.
The air itself seemed to tighten, and what they sensed was right.
Sakura was dead.
And the way Elliot learned, the same way the audience did… alongside him - was not in a hospital or in any of the ways the film had spent two hours preparing them for.
He was sitting at home, watching television with his mother.
An ordinary evening, and the news came through the screen - impersonal, factual, indifferent.
And she hadn't died because of her disease.
She had been stabbed, by a random attacker - a stranger.
The shock was total.
Not just within the story - in the theatre.
An audible, collective intake of breath that no one had planned and no one could take back.
Because the audience had spent the entire film bracing for her death, had known it was coming from the very first frame, had built their emotional defences around the certainty of a slow, medical, dignified goodbye–
And Regal had taken all of that preparation and rendered it meaningless.
She didn't die the way they were ready for.
She died the way people actually die - suddenly, stupidly, without poetry or meaning or closure.
And that made it worse.
….
After that, the film became something else entirely.
Everything that followed - the grief, absence, and the unbearable silence where Sakura's voice used to be, it hit the audience with a force that went beyond sadness. It was a devastation that doesn't announce itself with sobs and wailing. It sits in your chest like a stone and refuses to move.
Everyone was crying… Some in visible ways, others were silent, jaws clenched, blinking too fast and few had given up on composure entirely.
And then came the sequence where Elliot receives Sakura's book from her mother - the diary, a personal record she had kept throughout her illness, the pages she had never let anyone read.
He opened it, and he read.
And what was the most masterfully crafted five minute monologue of Sakura, caught in the most beautiful way possible.
Everything was perfect. The dialogue, the imaginary world, the VFX, the extraordinary movement.
It was a top notch, and once in a lifetime movement.
And somehow, despite the terms running down their faces, impossibly, the audience found themselves smiling and even laughing.
Because the voice on those pages was her.
Unmistakably, irrepressibly her - bright and ridiculous and full of life, even in handwriting, even in memory, even from the other side of a line that couldn't be uncrossed.
But the laughter couldn't hold.
It kept collapsing back into grief, because every word, joke, observation, and moment of Sakura being Sakura on those pages - it all came stamped with the same unbearable footnote:
She is no longer here.
They were laughing and crying at the same time, and they didn't understand what kind of emotion that was, because there isn't a word for it.
The feeling of being shown the full, radiant, irreplaceable aliveness of a person - after that aliveness has ended.
The film ended, and the theatre didn't move.
Not a shuffle, whisper, or a single person reaching for their coat or checking their phone.
Just rows and rows of people sitting in the dark, undone, trying to remember how to breathe in a world where the story was over and the lights were about to come up and they were going to have to stand and walk out and somehow carry on as though they hadn't just been gutted by a film about a girl named Sakura and a boy who loved her too quietly and a title that, by now, meant everything.
….
Noel and Laurence headed straight back to their college dorms the moment the film was finished.
The first thing Noel did was pull a small, worn notebook from his drawer and settle into his reading desk.
Then he began to write.
A review - though he would never call it that, but he preferred the word observation, his personal takeaway.
He never posted these anywhere.
This was his after film routine, his way of metabolizing what he felt before the feeling faded or, worse, became something he could no longer articulate.
So he wrote, while Laurence, on the other side of the room, scrolled through the internet in comfortable silence.
===
The film opens in a way that no conventional instinct would advise, and for that alone, I have to commend Regal Seraphsail - the director and the writer - for making such a fearless narrative choice in the very first scene.
The move was so bold and without a shred of uncertainty, that shows how much the man trusts his own script completely.
Trust me - It could have gone worse.
Thereafter, what happened in that theatre has to be something one must experience themselves, and whoever watched it firsthand - all say roughly the same thing:
For the first ninety minutes, the audience lived, laughed, gasped and whispered. The chemistry between the two leads - a relatively unknown actress named Zendaya and Tom Holland - were electric, fragile, and utterly real.
The female lead character Sakura is a girl made of sunlight and defiance. While the young man Tom is a character made of walls and silence.
Together, they were unbearable.
Together, they were everything.
And then came the final thirty minutes.
….
Note: If you haven't seen the film yet, stop here. What follows contains spoilers.
….
The final thirty minutes of the film.
It was exhausting.
Exhausting in every way a piece of art should be allowed to exhaust you.
What happens in the last act of [I Want to Eat Your Pancreas] is genuinely difficult to put into words.
No. It isn't complicated like any of Regal's usual film endings.
In actuality, it is the opposite.
This is, by a wide margin, the most simple ending Regal Seraphsail has ever written.
It is not a twist or a surprise.
Death, in this film, is not a plot device…. it is a fact.
The audience knows from the first frame that Sakura is dying.
The film knows that the audience knows.
And yet, somehow, the ending lands with the force of something you never saw coming, because the film has spent two hours teaching you to hope–
–to believe, against all evidence and reason, that maybe this time, maybe for these two people, maybe the universe will make an exception.
It doesn't.
But what it does instead is something worse, and something more beautiful: it shows you what happens after.
While many movies skip these parts, Regal takes a deeper step to explore the aftermath of losing someone.
After their death, love and someone has rearranged the furniture of your soul and then left, and you are standing in the middle of your own life, surrounded by all this rearranged furniture, and you have to decide whether to put it back the way it was or learn to live in the new configuration.
Haruki chooses the new configuration.
And when the film ends for real, the title - [I WANT TO EAT YOUR PANCREAS] - appears for the second time.
And unlike the first time, now, only now, does the audience understand what the title truly means.
….
It means: I want to take the part of you that is dying and make it part of me. I want to consume your pain. I want your suffering to live inside me so it doesn't have to live inside you alone. I want to carry you - all of you, even the parts that are broken, even the parts that are ending - because that is what love is.
Love is not letting someone die alone.
Love is eating the pancreas.
….
And ending there - on that realization, on that quiet devastation - could have been the most wholesomely sorrowful yet beautiful conclusion a film could offer.
But Regal, once again, pushed further.
He gave the audience Sakura's perspective.
Her voice and her side of the story.
Everything she never said out loud, delivered in melody after the screen had already gone dark.
Through an end-credits song.
And I will say this with absolute certainty: if there was a single human being in that theatre who made it through the entire film without shedding a tear, even the most cold hearted serial killer would have no choice but to become a child here:
And if, impossibly, someone still managed to hold it together?
Then only two explanations exist:
Either they haven't actually watched the film.
Or they were already dead.
….
.
[To be continued…]
●──────●◎●──────●
Author Note:
Visit Patreon to instantly access +1 chapter for free, available for Free Members as well.
For additional content please do support me and gain access to +15 more chapters.
--> [email protected]/OrgoWriters