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Fires on the Plain

Fires on the Plain
Fires on the Plain

Director: Shin’ya Tsukamoto

Writer: Shin’ya Tsukamoto

Based on the book by: Shohei Ooka

Original title: Nobi

Japan 2014

87 mins

War is hell! But that cliché is often contained in a more mundane frame. In Terrence Malick’s 1998 The Thin Red Line the battle for Guadalcanal is soothed by philosophical voice-overs and magic hour photography. The same year Saving Private Ryan had Steven Spielberg seek to justify the bloody horror of war with a broader ‘good war’/ ‘greatest generation’ frame. Clint Eastwood’s twin films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima are remarkable for their shifting perspectives and ambivalence, but as with the HBO series Band of Brothers and The Pacific, there is a sense that each film is careful of its historical context. Authenticity is as much concerned with uniforms and hardware as with the lived experience of war.

Fires on the Plain offers something quite different. Shin’ya Tsukamoto presents a tubercular nightmare vision of war in all its bloody ferocity. This is an infernal internal vision. Private Tamura (Tsukamoto himself) racked with TB is a dead man walking, staggering from field hospital, where he is refused treatment, back to his unit, where he is beaten because he is too sick to forage for food. ‘If they turn you away again, kill yourself with the grenade,’ his commanding officer tells him. But some feint erotic memory keeps Tamura clinging to life and he flees into the jungle as the Americans launch another attack.

Everything we see from Tamura’s perspective is heightened with the same mad subjectivity that carved Tsukamoto’s punk body-horror Tetsuo a cult niche. The jungle is a painful emerald green, so gorgeously fecund and vital as to make it seem impossible that these men are all starving and rotting away. The enemy is an invisible power striking with God-like impunity from the skies, and even when the soldiers are drawn into battle on the ground they first unleash a God-like bright light onto proceedings, before the machine guns and bullets begin to churn up bodies once more.

Taken from Shohei Ooka’s novel Nobi – already filmed in 1959 by Kon Ichikawa – Fire on the Plains tears to shreds ideas of Japanese military honour. There is scant Bushido here. All cohesion and discipline has broken down, and madness grips the tattered remnants of the army. Isolated from his unit and ever closer to death, Tamura is pushed to the extreme, stripped of everything that makes him human, wandering the jungle looking for escape. Like John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific (1968), the film attains the power of fable as Tamura descend through a paradisiacal landscape into a realm of the dead, where the survivors are reduced to cannibalism, gnawing on each other like something from a Goya canvas.

Fires on the Plain screened as part of Black Movie Festival 2015.

John Bleasdale

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In the Basement

In the Basement 1
In the Basement

Director: Ulrich Seidl

Original title: Im Keller

Austria 2014

84 mins

Ulrich Seidl likes to go where it hurts and, over the last 35 years, he’s been there and back again many times in his relentless attempt to explore the murkier depths and chasms of Austrian society. Sometimes he digs deeper than anyone else would dare, as in his 1994 documentary Animal Love (Tierische Liebe), in which he portrayed a number of Viennese residents who turn to their animals for affection and more. At other times, such as in his most recent Paradise trilogy, he uses fictional settings and stories to sting, invade and undermine the human psyche and the terrifying obsessions and perversions it can nurture, fiercely drawing out patterns of social behaviour that range from the mundane to the extreme.

In his latest documentary, In the Basement, he sets out to investigate what’s happening in Austrian cellars and what kind of relationship the often dubious owners have with their precious spaces underground. And as one would expect from a Seidl film, what he finds is a bunch of rather obscure characters, framed and juxtaposed in carefully arranged single-take shots with non-judgemental compassion, who (at least partially) seem almost desperate to step out of the shade and into the spotlight of his honest, vigilant camera. Among the most memorable are a failed opera singer who has turned his cellar into a fully operational underground shooting range; a devoted Nazi and his memorabilia cabinet; the inhabitants of professional and private SM-studios; and the ‘mommy’ of shockingly natural-looking baby dolls stored in shoe boxes.

The portraits are filmed in typical, tableau-like perfection, mocking both the protagonists within the film and the act of documentary filmmaking itself. To some extent, In the Basement is crafted in the same way that John Waters created Shock Value, an often fascinating, frequently creepy, unashamedly funny compilation of oddities and curiosities that are occasionally hard to digest. And yet, over the course of the film you begin to wonder whether there is anything new, anything unique being said here that couldn’t be found elsewhere.

Still, what becomes clear after watching In the Basement is that even after more than three decades of arduous research, Seidl doesn’t seem to run short of impaired souls to explore and portray in his films, and his combination of grotesque rituals with tragic comedy is handled with an increasingly deft balance of wit, irony and candour in almost every work he produces. And even if the film makes no direct connection to the case of Joseph Fritzl – the Austrian who kept his daughter imprisoned in the cellar of their very own house, raped and abused her over nearly a quarter of a century, and fathered her seven children – the mere thought of his existence adds a layer of disconcerting reality to Seidl’s protagonists who merrily display and confirm that whatever is happening in some Austrian basements these days, it’s far from the ordinary.

Pamela Jahn

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.
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The Man in the Orange Jacket

The Man in the Orange Jacket
The Man in the Orange Jacket

Director: Aik Karapetian

Writer: Aik Karapetian

Cast: Anta Aizupe, Maxim Lazarev, Aris Rozentals

Original title: M.O.Zh.

Latvia 2014

71 mins

An odd, upsetting 71 minutes from Latvia, in which an unnamed man, dressed in the utilitarian high-visibility vest of the title, separates from the crowds of similarly attired workers, leaves a plant and makes his way to the house of the industrialist who has just put him and 211 others out of work. There, he uses his toolkit to exact bloody revenge, and maybe steal a little of the luxury lifestyle he feels he is owed. However, something isn’t right; the mansion makes strange noises, the cupboards are bare. Rich food, when he eats it, doesn’t agree with him, cigars make him choke. He’s plagued by nightmares, just-glimpsed figures and the feeling that he’s being stalked. Possibly by a man in an orange jacket…

Partly a twist on home-invasion horror, part old-fashioned ghost story, part politically conscious fable, The Man in the Orange Jacket is complex and unsettling. Bringing to mind The Shining and Jan Švankmajer in some places, The Woman in Black in others, it is not averse to getting properly nasty now and then. Divided into four acts, and largely dialogue free, it eludes simple explanation. Has the act of murder and greed in act one turned the man into his own enemy in the class war? Is he simply a horrible psychopath being tortured by the unquiet shades of his victims? How much of any of this is only happening within his head? Undoubtedly there is an emphasis on the emptiness of bourgeois desire, and on the corruptions of capital, especially in scenes where he treats two (apparently twin) prostitutes he has hired as a ‘rich man’ appallingly, showing his own capacity for exploitation.

Frankly, I’d be lying if I said I had a handle on exactly what was going on at every given moment. What I can say without much fear of contradiction is that the sound design is brilliant and that writer-director Aik Karapetian is a dab hand at evoking nameless menace and delivering brutal shocks. Approach with caution.

Mark Stafford

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.
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Monsters: Dark Continent

Monsters Dark Continent
Monsters: Dark Continent

Format: Cinema

Release date: 1 May 2015

Distributor: Vertigo Films

Director: Tom Green

Writers: Tom Green, Jay Basu

Cast: Johnny Harris, Sam Keeley, Joe Dempsie

UK 2014

123 mins

Gareth Edwards’ 2010 Monsters was a little gem, extracting maximum effect from very minimal resources to deliver an offbeat genre film that was at once a fragile love story and an ambiguous monster movie with much to say about First World/Third World dynamics. A lot of people like it. Tom Green’s sequel pisses that goodwill up the wall with a meat-headed Iraqistan allegory compiled from the Big Book of War Movie Clichés.

Our heroes, who I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to actually like, are a bunch of blue-collar would-be workers from burnt-out Detroit who have little option in life but to join the army, and thus find themselves somewhere in the Middle East, which has become an Infected Zone, just as Mexico was in the first film. This means that massive herds of wandering squid-like beasties are rampaging across the deserts and through the cities. Trouble is, the US army’s attempts to keep the areas quarantined and stop the aliens spreading has resulted in a hell of a lot of collateral damage, an angry population and thus an army of local insurgents intent on repelling the human invaders from their soil. Amidst this mess, our Detroit crew, now christened ‘Team Tiger Shark’, is assigned to veteran Sergeant Noah (Johnny Harris) to rescue a lost platoon.

What follows is a series of scrapes with both the beasties and the locals, wherein Team Tiger Shark get severely whittled down, Noah begins to lose his mind and the remaining grunt (Sam Keeley) goes a little native and realises that maybe bombing the living crap out of people is wrong, that the monsters are occasionally quite pretty, and that Arabs, like, have children too. To be fair, there is a fair amount of visual spectacle, the action sequences are quite well mounted, and the last act is admittedly more interesting than what has preceded it, but honestly, by that time I was past caring.

There are two main problems. One is that, from the moment we meet them, Team Tiger Shark are such a bunch of ‘bro’s before ho’s’, ‘I’ve got your back out there, man’ coke n’ hooker-using macho dick-swinging arseholes that, frankly, couldn’t die fast enough. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t Green’s intention, at least if all the music that kicked in any time one of the pricks got injured is anything to go by.

Problem two is that the monsters of the title have an oddly underwritten, undefined and minimal role to play in their own film. Sure, we see a lot more of them, and beautifully realised they are too. It’s just that, well, you could remove them entirely from the story with very little effect on things. Their part in the narrative could be replaced by sandstorms or unexploded bombs. Surplus to requirements, they are reduced to decoration, as the unremarkable sub-Platoon dynamics take centre stage.

A horribly misjudged, irritating film.

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

Mark Stafford

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White Bird in a Blizzard

White Bird in a Blizzard
White Bird in a Blizzard

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 March 2015

Distributor: Altitude Film Distribution

Director: Gregg Araki

Writer: Gregg Araki

Based on the novel by: Laura Kasischke

Cast: Shailene Woodley, Eva Gree, Christopher Meloni

USA 2014

91 mins

So here’s Gregg Araki, blissfully mired in the late 8os again, soundtrack by Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd (of course). Cast full of photogenic shag-happy youths (of course!). Would-be traumatic events viewed through a veil of blank adolescent disaffection (…but of course!). That same nightclub that seems to feature in every one of his films pops up again, chock-full of Depeche Mode T-shirt-wearing teenagers shuffling through the frame. One wonders whether Mr Araki will ever outgrow his doomy, sun-fried obsessions, and one kind of hopes he never will.

This time it’s an adaptation of a novel (by Laura Kasischke), in which a middle-class suburban mother (Eva Green) mysteriously disappears one day, leaving her daughter Kat (Shailene Woodley) to live on with a hole in her life, troubled by dreams, endlessly wondering what happened. She moves on, trying to relate to stiff daddy (Christopher Meloni), attending therapy (with Angela Bassett), going to college, ditching ‘C average’ boyfriend Phil (Shiloh Fernandez) and seducing, with little effort, the detective in charge of her mother’s case (Thomas Jane). But eventually the pieces will fall into place, and the truth will be revealed.

White Bird in a Blizzard is a handsome beast, with bright widescreen compositions that emphasise the distance between its characters, and a thoroughly thought-through sense of design. Araki here tends to deliberately avoid establishing shots, leaving us in a world of interiors and backyards that he can fill with his wasted teens and dysfunctional adults, where the mundane and transgressive are never far apart. The prevailing mood is a kind of woozy numbness, only occasionally pierced by moments of shock, or by Eva Green’s unsettling performance as the missing mother, wine glass ever in hand, poisonous to her husband, all over her daughter’s boyfriend, throbbing with unmet desire. The film becomes a lot more compelling while she’s on screen, and frankly she wipes the floor with the younger cast, who, while fun to watch, with their profane (and occasionally anachronistic) banter, just don’t have the dimensions of mommie dearest.

The determined air of dreamy unreality that hangs over the film works against full emotional engagement, and, perversely, makes it quite a breezy watch, despite the dark and complicated possibilities of the subject matter. It’s closer to John Waters than David Lynch in the ‘sick heart of suburbia’ stakes. And while it’s more like Mysterious Skin than the flashier ‘teen apocalypse’ works in Araki’s back catalogue, it doesn’t quite bite as deep as that film. ‘You scratch the surface and there’s just… more surface’, Kat intones at one point. Well, quite. But it’s an enjoyable surface to scratch.

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

Mark Stafford

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Wild Tales

Wild Tales
Wild Tales

Format: Cinema

Release date: 27 March 2015

Distributor: Curzon Film World

Director: Damián Szifrón

Writer: Damián Szifrón

Cast: Liliana Ackerman, Luis Manuel Altamirano García, Alejandro Angelini

Original title: Relatos salvajes

Argentina, Spain 2014

122 mins

An aeroplane flight takes a plunge into the unexpected when the passengers realise they all have something in common. The waitress at a roadside café realises she is serving a man who deserves to die. A small road rage incident between two motorists in the mountains turns with alarming speed into a Duel-like battle for survival. A demolitions expert gets his life destroyed by a parking enforcement company and takes the appropriate measures. A millionaire tries to buy a way out of his son’s complicity in a hit and run, but finds himself quibbling about the financial details. A wedding party goes south in spectacular fashion when the bride realises some ugly truths about her groom.

Wild Tales, a glossy Spanish/Argentine co-production, is a portmanteau affair from writer/director Damián Szifrón, produced by a brace of Almodóvars. It eschews any linking devices or modish title cards and just gets on with delivering its six, well, wild tales, of darkly comical societal breakdown. In all of the stories there is a delicious turning point from a recognisable world where reason holds sway to one of delirious abandonment where its mostly middle-class protagonists utterly lose themselves to the petty delights of revenge and score settling. We end up in a world of murder and mayhem and, in the fourth tale, a heart-warming act of terrorism, entirely able to understand how we got here, but a bit dizzy about how it all escalated so fast.

This is fantastically entertaining stuff, from the knockout , big-budget Buñuelian punch of the opening story onwards, with beautiful photography by Javier Julia, fine music by Gustavo Santaolalla, and not a foot put wrong in editing or performances. There’s a gleeful perversity at work here, as if Szifrón is simultaneously despairing at all this appalling behaviour and finding it hard to hide his delight at the path things have taken. The stories display a welcome versatility of mood and texture: the second is a rain-soaked gloomy Gothic, the third a dusty, savage urbanoia horror in glaring daylight, the fourth an elegantly mounted slow builder. For my money, the fifth tale takes the foot off the gas a little too much, and while it’s cutting, it just doesn’t have the snap of the others. The last episode, ‘Till death do us part’, however, was one of the most exhilarating pieces of celluloid I’ve seen in a long while, a concentrated bomb of depravity and self-abasement captured brilliantly with agile camerawork that had me watching through my fingers (and wondering how close every drunken reception gets to this…). Like an act of revenge, Wild Tales probably isn’t healthy or edifying, but damn, it feels good. Highly recommended.

Mark Stafford

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

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When Animals Dream

When Animals Dream
When Animals Dream

Format: Cinema

Release date: 3 April 2015

Distributor: Altitude Film Distribution

Director: Jonas Alexander Arnby

Writer: Rasmus Birch

Cast: Sonia Suhl, Lars Mikkelsen, Sonja Richter

Original title: Når dyrene drømmer

Denmark 2014

84 mins

A Danish teenage lycanthropic affair, When Animals Dream concerns the pubescent awakening of Marie (Sonia Suhl), a girl growing up in a tiny coastal village, where everybody is in each other’s pocket and the single onshore industry involves the gutting of fish. On top of the usual libidinal stirrings and physical developments Marie has more singular problems to deal with: there’s the growing realisation that her domestic situation is far from normal. Why is the local doctor suddenly scheduling monthly appointments? Exactly what is the condition that has left her mother heavily sedated and wheelchair-bound? Clearly there is something her father (Lars Mikkelsen) isn’t telling her, and it seems to have the locals spooked.

Whilst swimming the same waters as the likes of Ginger Snaps or Teeth, this is a much more Scandinavian affair. It’s a slow burner with sparse dialogue and a distinctive gloomy look, all lowering skies and creamy yellowing light. Performances are subdued and naturalistic, and there’s none of the flip snarkiness that’s become de rigueur with US productions. Instead we have something a bit more generous, humanistic and affecting. The adolescent agony is conveyed effectively, and there’s a very real sense of small town oppression, with a terrific scene where a traditional first day at work humiliation ritual bubbles with understated hostility. And whilst the messy transformative business isn’t exactly box fresh, the film hangs on an interesting question: what do you do with a problem like Marie? Whilst the film is largely seen from her point of view, and Suhl’s delicate, defiant performance ensures that we are on her side, Rasmus Birch’s screenplay does not sideline or downplay the villagers’ understandable concerns. The tale could be a metaphor for every outsider status from homosexuality to mental illness, but this metaphor means that there’s a heavy price to pay when, if you’ll forgive me, things get hairy every month. No wonder her dad looks so tortured, he’s paralysed by love and fear.

Though this is Marie’s film, and is built around her path from awkward confusion to outright rebellion, I can’t help noticing that the last act, like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Spring, centres around a would-be boyfriend’s acceptance that his lover is prone to ripping the occasional throat out. There seems to be something in the air, and whilst it might not mean much (other than Let the Right One In casting a long shadow), in this case it takes Marie’s story away from her and gives it to someone else. In all three films you know which way the finale is going to go, and wonder how the toothier direction might have played. Although it could have benefited from a rise in heat towards the end and it is probably a little too understated for some genre fans, it is nevertheless classy, smart stuff, and a promising debut from director Jonas Alexander Arnby.

Mark Stafford

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

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Tokyo Tribe

Tokyo Tribe
Tokyo Tribe

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 May 2015

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Based on the manga by: Santa Inoue

Cast: Akihiro Kitamura, Tomoko Karina, Hitomi Katayama, Ryôhei Suzuki, Nana Seino

Japan 2014

116 mins

A Jap hip hop gangsta musical, Sion Sono’s latest is set in an alternative Tokyo where the rival gangs that rule the city’s outer districts have been maintaining an uneasy truce for years, until, over the course of one night, a murky conspiracy is set in motion to set clan against clan and bring war to the streets. Can the various antagonistic pimps, hustlers, strippers, dealers and loved up teens overcome their differences, beat the bad guys and restore peace?

Of course they bloody can. This isn’t a film of murky moral complexity, this is an exhilarating, garish manga-based phantasmagoria, much more concerned with giving us a wild ride than with such fripperies as plot or storytelling or making a whole lot of sense. Filmed largely in fluid roaming steadicam takes that must have taken an age to set up and choreograph, Tokyo Tribe is a feast of outrageous action against over-the-top set design. The screen is full of scantily clad gyrating girls and splattery ultra-violence, when it’s not full of eccentrically dressed MC’s telling you what’s up. Rather than giving us anything authentically human, most of the actors are channelling hip hop archetypes, exemplified by Riki Tekeuchi’s utterly grotesque turn as chief bad guy Lord Buppa, a leering, groping cannibal king in a gold Elvis suit, eyeballs rolling so far back in his head it suggests he’s permanently overdosing on elephant tranquilisers.

If all this sounds like a blast, well, it is, up to a point, but after the first 20 minutes or so a certain repetitiveness creeps in. Once again, there’s the feeling with Sion Sono that he’s not really in control of his material. He’s having too much fun to be concerned with consistency of tone, or getting over characters and story. The result is a whole lot of cool stuff that doesn’t really slow down or speed up or build. Whilst it’s never boring, irritations creep in. The various ‘tribes’ are introduced to us over and over again, whilst the evil plot at the centre of the tale is left largely unexplained. A military tank is introduced with much fanfare only to be utterly forgotten about. A dick size joke that should, at best, have been a throwaway gag is allowed to take over the final moments of the film. Elements don’t gel; at times it plays like a Rooney/Garland ‘let’s put on a show right here’ flick, at others like Tinto Brass’s Caligula. The ‘one love’ vibe that ends the movie doesn’t fit with the fetishised weaponry and wall-to-wall arse- kicking. The colourful cartoon fun stylings don’t sit well with the rape and torture scenes.

Sure, some of these glaring contradictions may be part of the hip hop culture Sono is representing. But like a rapper yelling ‘Peace! Out!’ after a set filled with Glock-wielding revenge fantasies and badass bragging… well, you find yourself wishing for a little more self-awareness and self-control. The sexual politics especially are pretty horrible, from the opening scene where a naïve female cop is stripped to the waist to be used as a map of Tokyo by knife-wielding bad boy Mera (Ryôhei Suzuki, who, frankly, did not die enough) practically all the film’s female characters are used as squealing eye candy, when they aren’t being used as kung fu kicking eye candy: it’s a rare shot of female lead Nana Seino that doesn’t feature the gusset of her white panties.

Still, the music by B.C.D.M.G throbs and pulses effectively, and it has energy to burn. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. But I’m still waiting for Sono to give us the undeniably great, mad film that he clearly has the chops to deliver. Tokyo Tribe: big fun on screen, bad taste in mouth. Peace. Out.

Mark Stafford

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

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Spring

Spring
Spring

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 May 2015

Distributor: Metrodome

Directors: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead

Writer: Justin Benson

Cast: Lou Taylor Pucci, Nadia Hilker

Italy, USA 2014

109 mins

A horror-imbued, science-fiction-tinged tale of rebirth and new beginnings, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s second feature avoids genre clichés to deliver an anxious exploration of romantic love. It follows young American Evan as he runs away to Italy after grief gets him into trouble at home. Coasting along with two loud Brits he met at his hostel, he arrives at a small seaside village, where he encounters the beguiling Louise, all sultry Mediterranean charm and free-spirited elusiveness. As their romance develops in this dreamy setting, it soon becomes apparent that Louise hides a dangerous, ancient secret.

A searching, fretful film, Spring probes the essence of love through earnest (at times a little clunky) dialogue. With a creature that could be a vampire, a zombie, a mutant, or a predatory animal, the horror elements are used to reveal a deep unease about the strange nature of women and their bodily transformations, as well as an intense yearning to find a way of making someone yours forever. It is the story of a taming of sorts, of the monstrous, menacing other, but also of one’s own fears, although that taming seems a little too much like wishful thinking for the resolution to be entirely convincing.

In his single-minded pursuit of love, Evan is endearingly naïve and single-minded. More experienced in many ways, Louise seems stronger and wiser, but her characterisation does not ring quite true, and she feels more like a fantasy than a real person. As she springs up in the village square almost like the incarnation of Evan’s desire, it is possible to imagine that she was conjured up by his imagination while he drifts in this far-off, foreign place.

The setting, near Pompeii, with the volcano as background, is used to great effect to create the feel of something archaic and primeval. The premise for the horrific aspect of the story is fascinating, with its insistence on scientific explanation over the supernatural, which is also part of Benson and Moorhead’s refusal to fall into easy genre categories. The story is firmly grounded in nature, with many inserts of insects, as well as unhurried sequences showing Evan’s work at the farm where he is staying, surveying the olive trees, the caterpillars that eat them and the strange brown goo produced by root rot.

Visually, it is a tremendously assured and inventive film that mixes detailed close-ups and startling aerial shots, small scale and large scale, to inscribe the nascent intimacy of the two lovers against the wider panorama of life. It is this ambition of vision together with the freshness of their talent that makes Benson and Moorhead ones to watch, and despite its weaknesses, the film as a whole, in its imperfect quest for love, has a winning dark charm.

Virginie Sélavy

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

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The World of Kanako

The World of Kanako
The World of Kanako

Format: DVD

Release date: 15 August 2016

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Tetsuya Nakashima

Writers: Tetsuya Nakashima, Miako Tadano, Nobuhiro Monma

Based on the novel by: Akio Fukamachi

Cast: Kôji Yakusho, Nana Komatsu, Satochi Tsumabuki

Original title: Kawaki

Japan 2014

118 mins

From Memories of Matsuko through to this new offering, director Tetsuya Nakashima has developed a striking world of intense violence, emotional and physical, punctuated by moments of candy-coloured exuberance. While Matsuko, Confessions and The World of Kanako were all adapted from novels written by different authors, there is a continuing fascination for adolescent girls and the strange closed-off realm they inhabit running through them (as well as through Nakashima’s earlier Kamikaze Girls).

Kôji Yakusho, a favourite of the great Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s, plays Akikazu Fujishima, a washed-out former detective searching for his missing estranged daughter Kanako at the request of his distraught ex-wife. In the course of his investigation, he uncovers a vicious underworld of drugs, brutality and sexual exploitation. As terrible secrets are revealed, he is also forced to face the memories of his own actions as a father and husband.

Akikazu is a man who can only express himself and relate to the world through violence. His approach to the people around him, whether he feels affection or aversion for them, is pretty much limited to shouting, beating and raping. And although the film’s focus is on Kanako, it is really Akikazu’s vision of the world that the audience is plunged into, and it is a fairly relentless, harrowing experience. As the film progresses, it is as if the violence inside him became increasingly visible physically, as if it could no longer be contained: as he is forced to face himself, his already unkempt appearance gradually descends into full-on bruised and blood-stained messiness.

A gaping absence at the heart of the story, Kanako remains a question mark that looms over the film, an enigma that remains mostly unresolved. Essentially unknowable, she is outlined only through other people’s perceptions of her, people who all have deep, passionate, powerful feelings about her. Here as in Confessions, teenagers are troubling, ambiguous creatures, simultaneously playful and cruel, childlike and knowing, unpredictably alternating between innocence and nastiness, to the utter bewilderment and dismay of the adults around them – and Kanako is the ultimate example of that. But just as in Confessions, adults are capable of terrible acts of revenge for the wrong done to their loved ones. As morally murky as Confessions, and as emotionally intense as Memories of Matsuko, The World of Kanako is a visceral dive into hearts of darkness and the ties that bind them.

Virginie Sélavy

This review is part of our London Film Festival 2014 coverage.

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