Dir: Tetsuya Nakashima , Japan, 2010, 106 mins, Japanese with subtitles
Cast: Takako Matsu, Masaki Okada, Yoshino Kimura
Review by Dave Hall
This psychological thriller from oddball director Nakashima is visually and aurally stylish but it lacks any real weight and becomes increasingly hysterical towards the end. A shame because the brilliantly structured and edited opening half hour seems to be setting us up for a darkly satisfying journey into a bubbling cauldron of murder, revenge and mental disintegration.
Yuko Moriguchi ( Matsu ) is a middle school teacher, who one day stands in front of her entire class and accuses two of the students of murdering her 4 year-old daughter. She then pre-announces the terrible revenge she’s prepared for them. The two students react differently, one continuing his life apparently unaffected, the other going completely off the rails. By the end, Moriguchi’s revenge has been exacted but in ways even more fiendish than we were first led to expect.
Nakashima uses an inventive structure to tell his tortured tale: in turn, each of a number of characters makes their confession, the stories overlapping to create a labyrinth of denials, manipulations and lies. It says something that the two most sympathetic characters are already dead when the film opens. But whilst the motivations and methods of Moriguchi are just about plausible as the centre of a febrile vortex, those of the two killers are fatally simplistic; one, abandoned by his mother, has become an amoral sociopath: the other, over-protected by his mother, has become an easily-led weakling. This cod psychology short-circuits an engagement with anything very profound, and we’re left with Nakashima’s smoke and mirrors show to cover up the increasingly thin plotline.
It’s quite a show though. To begin with muted colours are used to create an oppressive atmosphere and Nakashima underlays this with an almost continuous soundtrack of brooding music tracks from the likes of Radiohead and Japanese ambient axemen Boris. As Moriguchi makes the film’s opening confession, the students (and we) flit in and out of attentiveness, texting, chatting, joshing, listening to music, until the import of her words hooks in the audience.
Once this opening passage is over, the film explodes into a multi-layered narrative and, like Moriguchi with her students, we often have to filter out the white noise of Nakashima’s hyperactivity to get to the nub of a scene. It’s intoxicating and disorientating, perhaps more so for a non-Japanese speaking audience since so much is going on without the added distraction of subtitles, but it’s also a bit like being addressed by someone with attention deficit disorder. The few moments of stillness come courtesy of rain showers and bruise coloured clouds.
The acting is mostly no more than adequate, though Kimura as the over-protective mother brings some much needed emotional life to her scenes. But she’s fighting the tide, and for all the whizz-bang visual pyrotechnics (literally at the impressively mounted climax), there’s very little nourishment; it’s like wasabi sauce without the sushi.
