“Asura,” a seven-episode Japanese drama on Netflix (in Japanese, with subtitles, or dubbed), is the full package: a detailed, human-scale domestic drama with plenty to say, fascinating characters to say it and the stylishness to make it sing. The downside is that other shows feel paltry and thin in comparison. The upside is everything else.

2025 is less than a month old, but we may have already seen the best show of the year. .... The Takezawa sisters’ rebellion against the stillness that Japanese society forces upon them is gentle but profound. If Kore-eda can be a little indulgent in exploring this, it is only to better highlight the subtle, often understated ways these characters begin to reverberate with his signature humanism through the smallest gestures.

The year’s first grand television surprise, and additional confirmation that few filmmakers are as empathetic, nimble, and masterful as Kore-eda.

Asura doesn’t depict this family’s secrets as melodrama or a bustling mystery to be unraveled, it slowly and methodically lets us get to know these well-drawn characters. The family is not dysfunctional in an unrelatable way, like the Roys on Succession or Yellowstone‘s duplicitous Duttons, what’s so engaging is the fact that their problems, and the emotions that spill out as a result, are entirely possible and could happen to any of us.

His [Hirokazu Kore-eda's] gentle touch with character holds together a project that sometimes feels longer than it needs to be. Still, that extended runtime allows Kore-eda to come at his complex characters from multiple emotional angles, and for us to see ourselves a bit in all of them.