Parents' Guide to The Parades

Movie NR 2024 132 minutes
The Parades movie poster: A group of Asian people pose by a truck at a fairground

Common Sense Media Review

Barbara Shulgasser-Parker By Barbara Shulgasser-Parker , based on child development research. How do we rate?

age 13+

Dead people search for closure; violence, mature themes.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 13+?

Any Positive Content?

  • The Parades: group sits around light
  • The Parades: A man stand by a Ferris wheel
  • The Parades: An Asian man gestures outside

Parent and Kid Reviews

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What's the Story?

A woman floats in the sea as if dead, then washes up on the beach. We are led to believe she, Minako (Masami Nagasawa), is dead, but then she opens her eyes. That is not the last time THE PARADES sets us up to think one thing and then contradicts that thought immediately after. Desperate to find her 7-year-old son, Minako searches the nearby town, noting the rubble of the great earthquake that must have swept her out to sea. She is picked up by Akira (Kentaro Sakaguchi), a kindly van driver who takes her back to his encampment at a disused amusement park filled with others who, like Minako, are dead. The conceit is that their souls can't transition to "the other side" because they have "unfinished business." A gangster (Ryusei Yokohama) with a bullet hole in his chest feels bad that his death left his beloved girl behind. Another regrets breaking up with his girlfriend long ago when they were young. He also wishes he had finished the film he was working on when he died. (This character is inspired by a real film producer named Mitsunobu "Michael" Kawamura, who died in 2022.) Another feels the need to know how her fatherless son is doing on his own. Another wants to apologize to her high school friend for committing suicide and leaving the friend alone to fend off school bullies. The group guides Minako to search for her boy on their eerie monthly nighttime "parades." Will she find closure?

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say : Not yet rated
Kids say : Not yet rated

The Parades is a ponderous oddity with many touching moments and lovable characters, yet it disappoints. This love letter to filmmaking jerks tears and trots out truths we all recognize about nostalgia, sentimentality, longing, love, and the fleeting nature of life. But all those well-known clichés don't make this profound, original, or meaningful, the way the TV sitcom The Good Place managed to achieve every week in less than 30-minute episodes. Movies about people who don't know they are dead are not unusual, so what is new here?

Great movies spell things out just enough to keep the audience from being distracted by nagging inconsistencies. Here the big rule we learn is that the dead and living can't interact. If you're dead and someone sees and hears you, well they're dead, too. Yet the movie even breaks this rule. And what would it mean for unfinished business to be resolved? If the dead can't affect the living or interact with them, how can a dead person finish any business at all? What can you do for an old girlfriend or an orphaned son? You just can't figure out what point this movie is trying to make. The only certain takeaway is that once you're dead, the rules are out the window.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about how this compares to other movies about dead people struggling with their deadness.

  • What are some of the rules the movie sets out about dead people interacting with living people that appear to be broken here?

  • How does the "unfinished business" that keeps these characters from moving from limbo to their final resting differ from unfinished business that everyone leaves behind in death? Does the movie's premise make any sense?

Movie Details

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The Parades movie poster: A group of Asian people pose by a truck at a fairground

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