Like Someone in Love OTT Release: Cinephiles and lovers of deeply layered emotional storytelling, rejoice — Like Someone in Love, the acclaimed Japanese drama directed by Abbas Kiarostami, is finally making its way to streaming platforms.
This visually poetic and quietly unsettling film, starring Rin Takanashi in a career-defining role, will soon be available for audiences to stream from the comfort of their homes.
The film is slated to begin streaming on MUBI starting June 19th, 2025.
Plot
In the heart of Tokyo — a city that pulses with energy, anonymity, and quiet desperation — two strangers from vastly different worlds cross paths for one fleeting, life-altering day.
He is an elderly man, living a life of solitude surrounded by dusty books and fading memories in a small, meticulously kept apartment. Once a respected professor, now retired and adrift, he spends his days in silence and his nights in longing — for connection, for purpose, for a voice to echo through the silence of his empty home.
She is a young woman, navigating the chaos of her double life. By day, she is a university student, trying to stay afloat amid lectures, deadlines, and financial pressure. By night, she works as a discreet escort to make ends meet. When she’s sent on a job to visit this quiet old man, she expects the usual — a transactional encounter, brief and forgettable. She knows nothing about him, not even his name. He, on the other hand, believes he understands her — or perhaps projects onto her an image of someone he once knew, someone he longs to see again.
He invites her in with the kind of hesitant hospitality reserved for honored guests and cherished ghosts. She enters, weary, tense, offering the only thing she thinks he wants: her body. But to her surprise, he declines. Instead, he offers her dinner, conversation, a sense of calm — the kind she’s long forgotten. In his presence, she isn’t just a commodity or a role to play — she’s a young woman allowed, perhaps for the first time, to simply be.
Over the course of twenty-four hours, what begins as a shallow arrangement deepens into something strangely profound. Their bond, though built on misapprehensions, is quietly transformative.