There is a moment in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters (2018) that lingers like a slow exhale—a family, crowded on their cramped porch, listening to the distant sound of fireworks they cannot see. They tilt their heads upward, imagining the colors bursting over the Sumida River, their faces bathed in the glow of something just out of reach. It is a scene of profound tenderness, yet beneath it runs an undercurrent of absence, a reminder of all the things this family will never have. This duality—the warmth of connection and the cold reality of survival—lies at the heart of Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or-winning film, a story that dismantles the myth of family as sanctuary and exposes the quiet violence of a society that fails its most vulnerable.
At first glance, Shoplifters appears to be a simple tale of an unconventional household. In this film, the warm hues of family life unfold gently—almost deceptively—under the Tokyo sun. The film begins like a tender lullaby. A man and a boy, Osamu and Shota, return home after a casual shoplifting errand. Their small house is overcrowded yet brimming with life. There’s the tough but loving Nobuyo, the grandmother Hatsue, a young woman named Aki, and eventually, Yuri, a neglected girl quietly absorbed into the household after Osamu and Nobuyo find her outside in the cold. These strangers, sharing no blood, form what appears to be a loving, makeshift family. The scenes that follow are familiar in their intimacy: shared meals, whispered secrets, children at play. Many viewers, understandably, read the film as a tribute to the power of chosen families—those born not of biology but of care, circumstance, and mutual need.
Yet to view Shoplifters as merely a heartwarming tale of familial love is to miss the sharp blade beneath its velvet surface. Kore-eda, a filmmaker renowned for his ability to weave delicate human dramas into broader social critiques, is never content with surface-level sentimentality. In fact, the director has been unequivocal about his intentions: this is not a film about love, but about the failures of society. “Love is the surface,” he once said. “The real substance is inequality, injustice, and the structures that marginalize people.” What appears to be a celebration of found family is actually an autopsy—one performed with delicate hands, but no anesthesia.
The early parts of the film draw us in with the aesthetics of comfort. Kore-eda’s direction is subtle, graceful, immersive. A steaming bowl of noodles, a glint of sunlight through a frosted window, the quiet sigh of a child being tucked in—all become gentle strokes in a picture of domesticity that seems too fragile, perhaps too perfect, to last. He captures daily life not with drama, but with rhythms so ordinary they feel sacred. It’s in this softness that the film earns the trust of its audience. Yet, the warmth of these moments is always shadowed by an unspoken question: Why are these people together? The answer, when it comes, is as devastating as it is inevitable.
The illusion begins to unravel when Shota is caught stealing. This seemingly small incident triggers a police investigation that unravels the family’s carefully constructed fiction. The authorities, representing the rigid structures of society, cannot comprehend a family built on something other than legal or biological ties—they have gathered like driftwood, assembling themselves into something resembling a raft, floating against the current of Tokyo’s invisible but ruthless hierarchies. To the police, the Shibatas are criminals—not just for their petty thefts, but for daring to redefine what family means. In one of the film’s most heartbreaking exchanges, a detective asks Nobuyo, "Do you think children can be stolen?" Her reply—"You mean, like kidnapping? Or like saving them?"—cuts to the core of the film’s moral ambiguity. In this moment, the title of the film takes on new meaning. Not only have these people stolen to live—they have stolen their very family. They have stolen names, affection, roles. They are not a family in the eyes of the state. They are, in bureaucratic terms, a fabrication.
Yet, Yuri’s biological parents abused her. Shota was abandoned. Aki was discarded by a family that preferred her younger sister. In a world that has failed them so completely, is it theft to offer shelter, or is it the only act of kindness left? Their love—if we dare to call it that—has always been real, hasn’t it? Nobuyo’s gentle touch as she bathes Yuri, Osamu’s attempts to teach Shota life skills, Aki’s subtle acts of care—all these gestures ring true, no matter the legality of their foundation. Kore-eda complicates the moral lens through which we view these characters. He does not offer them as saints or victims, but as people navigating a cruel economy with the few tools they’ve been given: their bodies, their instincts, their capacity to nurture in spite of everything.
But then, just as we begin to reconcile ourselves to the family’s truth, the film turns colder. Hatsue dies quietly. Her death is not announced. There is no funeral. The family buries her under the house and continues to collect her pension. The absence of mourning is chilling. Even Aki, the most emotionally expressive, quickly rationalizes: “People grow old and die.” What should have been a rupture becomes merely an inconvenience—a loss of income.
Here, Kore-eda performs a devastating reversal. He has spent an hour building a cottage of warmth, only to burn it down in front of us. Slowly, unflinchingly, he reveals the calculations that underpin this family. Hatsue was allowed to stay because of her pension. Yuri was accepted because Nobuyo could not have children of her own. Aki remains because her sex work contributes income. Even Osamu and Nobuyo’s marriage is tinged with a shared past that is never fully disclosed but suggests guilt more than affection. Eventually, the family dissolves—Yuri returned to her abusive home, Shota placed in an institution, Nobuyo imprisoned—it is not with grand tragedy, but with quiet resignation. The system, inflexible and indifferent, reasserts its order.
It is in this unraveling that Shoplifters stops asking whether these people love one another, and starts asking: why are they like this? Why have they been left with so few options? The film’s gaze turns from its characters toward the structures that shaped them. A state that fails to protect a child from abuse. A system that forces women to sell their bodies while punishing them for it. A society that offers so little to its elderly that even their deaths must go undocumented.
And yet, Kore-eda is not interested in blame. He does not accuse. He observes, with painful precision. He shows how empathy from strangers—the grocer who forgives Shota, the brief hug from a deaf boy—offers warmth, but no solutions. These moments are moving, but fleeting. They do not change the family's fate. The warmth, like everything else in the film, is temporary. What lasts is the question: if our systems punish people for creating families outside the norm, then what options do they truly have?
In the film’s haunting final image, Yuri, now returned to her biological family, stands at a window, watching distant fireworks. Her face is still. We do not know what she is thinking. We do not even know if she remembers. But in the silence of that moment, Kore-eda plants his final question: was the love she received—stolen though it may have been—any less real than the one society now insists is rightfully hers?
Shoplifters is a quietly ferocious film. It asks us to reconsider everything we think we know about love, care, family, and justice. It resists catharsis. It withholds redemption. And in doing so, it becomes something rare: a portrait of the human condition that does not beg to be understood or resolved, but simply witnessed. What we take from it—whether despair or clarity or hope—is left entirely up to us.
In the end, Kore-eda offers no answers. He only takes away our illusions, one by one, until we are left with the simple, unbearable truth: in a society that fails its most vulnerable, even love becomes a crime.