Meowing into the Abyss: The Cats of Gokogu Shrine Review

Did we domesticate cats, or was it the other way around? A blissful model of coexistence breezes onscreen in The Cats of Gokogu Shrine (Gokogu no Neko, Japan, 2024), Kazuhiro Soda’s documentary following a community of street cats in Ushimado, Japan.

Unlike the Jellicle abominations of 2019’s Cats, or even the anthropomorphised characters in Turkish doco Kedi (2016), these creatures are allowed to merely be—for the most part. In his chronicle of the colony’s hilltop Shinto shrine home, Soda even conveys a feline approach in his camerawork, frame bobbing tentatively or resting languidly in a spot of sun. 

This is an observational feature, never indulging that the furry vagrants play a pivotal or spiritual part in Ushimado’s day-to-day. Instead, we get a stoic, squee-worthy portrait of the natural order of things in one particular seaside town—the sweetness of little lives, human and otherwise, balanced with the frank fact of death.

We begin in spring, meeting battle-worn tomcats and new batches of kittens amongst postcard-pretty, cherry-blossom landscapes. Some visitors find the cats therapeutic. They baby them, wiping their boogers and pss-pss-ing for their favourites (“Ushi-kun, he’s my idol”, one fangirl says of a black-and-white spotted male). The cats are never over-familiar, always keeping an air of slinky detachment from these carers and us viewers. The unknowability of the cat makes them an interesting subject for a documentary; they’re a very cute vacuum at the film’s core, a cuddly surface onto which we might project any anthropocentric narrative we please.

In an extensive second-act sequence, though, humans suddenly turn into predatory alien overlords, abducting the cats to spay and neuter them. “I’m so sorry you trust me”, Soda’s producer/partner/incidental star Kiyoko Kashiwagi apologises as she coaxes a cat towards its sterilisation, reluctantly trapping a cat in a cage. It’ll increase quality of life for the kitty community, but also effectively means that the animals are adorably waiting around to die off—instagrammable tourist attraction or not.

This funereal implication extends to the human population of Ushimado, who are mostly elderly or retired (a longtime local, Soda has documented the lives of his neighbours in more than one of his previous observational documentaries). One standout character is Mr. Suzuki, a stooped 88-year-old who works as a volunteer groundskeeper for the shrine. He just tolerates the cats, he says, but he has more in common with the yowling beasties than he thinks. Soda follows Suzuki as he silently goes through the motions of gardening and cleaning chores, his motivation as irrelevant as the reason behind why two cats might scamper idly across a graveyard. All living things here are shown to strive not for survival or material gain but for mere maintenance, harmony.

Despite an end credits ‘in memoriam’ sequence that had the whole cinema groaning with sadness in unison, The Cats of Gokogu Shrine characterises death as being as natural as the changing of the seasons. Wind and rain abrasively buffet Soda’s camera and mic at points, making the viewer feel diminutive, pet-like at the mercy of elemental forces. The director himself becomes swept into the kitty maelstrom, allowing a bedraggled tabby to shelter in his home when a typhoon rolls through town. As his footage lilts from winter into warmth, some focus on the titular stars has been lost. This can’t be classed as a nature documentary in any way, perhaps spending too much precious cat time on provincial council meetings. 

But there’s still a remarkable wholesomeness, and wholeness, to the grander scope of what Soda captures in his year of cat watching. The film fails to arrive at a declarative understanding of what role the cats serve in the townsfolks’ lives, and whether they in turn could live without us. Perhaps that is the understanding—that we’re all just purposeless stray mammals, huddling together against chance, nature and mortality.

Speaking from behind his camera, Soda explains to cheeky schoolchildren and bemused fisherman that “the cats are the main characters” of the project. Speaking onstage before the film’s premiere in the Berlinale Forum section, however, Soda thanked the “people, cats, insects and trees” of Ushimado—a more accurate acknowledgement of the film’s holistic scale. Our window into the film’s world can swell to include memories of wartime or shrink to focus on a one-eyed cat grooming its butt. 

Reality has taught us that this is a hard world for little things. But Soda makes this narrow slice of it feel easy, near-utopian, even in its spirited encapsulation of death; everything in its right place.