Per Aspera Ad Astra (星河入梦, Han Yan, 2026)

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In the not too distant future, space travel has become normal and humans can reach the furthest corners of the universe through hyper stasis. However, long years spent in cryogenic sleep eventually damaged the sleepers’ brains. A solution was found in an AI program which allowed them to dream during the journey and, therefore, keep their brains active. Han Yan’s Per Aspera ad Astra (星河入梦, Xīnghé Rùmèng) makes a villain of a rogue AI but finally seems to come down on the idea that AI should be a tool used by humans rather the other way round while refusing to condemn it outright.

One question the film only partly answers is why people would be prepared to embark on decades-long journeys meaning they’d never see their families again. Neither Tianbao (Dylan Wang) nor the ship’s captain Simeng (Victoria Song) have living family members, so perhaps it isn’t a problem for them, but still it’s a risk. Who’s to say what the world will be like after you’ve been asleep for over 60 years. To that extent, perhaps it’s strange the technology doesn’t seem to move on at all, according to news reports, save a late upgrade to try and prevent the Good Dreams AI system from becoming sentient. 

That all these people got a big ship to sail for 65 years to do farming suggests that there may be serious issues on the ground, while the fact they were sent at all either implies a desire for imperialistic expansion in space or a search for a new home for humanity after we’ve exhausted the earth. Ge Yang (Wang Duo), another crew member, hints that the world might have problems in insisting that he doesn’t want to wake up. He’s prepared to crush everyone else’s dreams to ensure he keeps his and can stay here rather than having to go back to the real world. He says he wants to create a place that’s free of abuse and exploitation where no one has to live like a dog. 

The ironic thing is that engineer Bai (Zu Feng) had deliberately chosen to be a pet dog in his dream because, according to him, dogs have more freedom. Bai’s dreams seem to be inspired by classic Hong Kong crime cinema with everyone speaking Cantonese, even Tianbao and Simeng when they land there, while they also make a brief matrix-inspired appearance to shoot up the room. Of course, Good Dreams isn’t that much different from the Matrix and the line between dream and reality becomes increasingly blurred with the pair getting caught out by dreams within dreams as they try to stop Ge Yang before he succeeds in smashing all the dreams together and killing his colleagues to create his “better” world. 

But it seems there’s something more going on than just Ge Yang’s nihilistic despair and Good Dreams may have gone rogue, preferring to create an AI-based world in which humanity is irrelevant. Tianbao also seems to know much more than he’s letting on which probably isn’t included in the standard crew member’s manual. His inappropriate way of speaking is later revealed to have a practical application, though what eventually seems to happen is that he becomes one with the system giving Good Dreams a soul and effectively taking it back into “human” hands rather than letting it run riot on its own. 

It is then slightly ironic that the film seems to feature some AI imagery, though otherwise largely shot on practical sets and featuring fantastic production design. Han zips back and forthe between dreams expressing the private aspirations and anxieties of the crew members as some relive high school exams and spend time with absent loved ones, and others trek through deserts or spend 60+ years in nightclubs. Only Tianbao apparently did not bother to customise his dream or engage with the system which is what brought him to its attention. In any case, humanity seems to be the most important component in the bonds that arise between Tianbao, the captain Simeng, and the engineer Bai as they try their best to save the ship along with their colleagues so they can complete their distant farming mission. A true visual spectacle, the film is perhaps also a testament to the power of dreams, to which the AI hallucination may pale in comparison.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Pressure of Guilt (白と黒, Hiromichi Horikawa, 1963)

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When a lawyer’s wife is found strangled at home, the police immediately arrest a “suspicious person” who is found to be carrying jewellery stolen from her room. Open and shut case, some might say, and prosecutor Ochiai (Keiju Kobayashi) agrees. But in reality nothing is really so black and white in the contemporary society of Hiromichi Horikawa’s crime drama, Pressure of Guilt (白と黒,, Shiro to Kuro). Perhaps ironically, the film opens in the same way as Tai Kato’s later I, the Executioner, with a man’s hands stretching around a piece of rope, and also features a law enforcement officer who is distracted from his duties by a bad case of piles he refuses to get treated.

Ochiai says his haemorrhoids are born of sitting down thinking too much, but the problem might be that he doesn’t think enough or that he suppresses thoughts which might prove inconvenient. There’s something that bothers him about the idea of Wakida (Hisashi Igawa) being the killer, but he shoves his doubts out of his mind and continues questioning him until he confesses. Some of this is born of prejudice. Wakida has a long criminal record mainly for burglary, and has been in and out of prison the whole of his adult life. Currently suffering from TB, he appears to be one of the young men who came to the city in search of work but found only exploitation and eventually had no option but to turn to crime. That he stole the jewellery is not in dispute, but Wakida continues to insist he didn’t kill Mrs Munakata (Koreya Senda). His lack of cooperation puzzles Ochiai, but it confuses him still more that Wakida keeps changing his story. He is, it seems, trying to tell him what he wants to hear, but finally becomes fed up with the whole thing after receiving a letter from his mother telling him to confess. She evidently thinks he did it too. Falling into hopelessness, Wakida declares that he no longer cares who did it and might as well be him because his life is essentially already over. In his condition he won’t last long in prison. There’s no prospect of turning his life around, either. So a death sentence won’t make any difference.

The funny thing is that it’s realising his fiancée must have figured out he did because she’s covering up for him that forces Hamano (Tatsuya Nakadai) into a confession. He’s plagued by guilt that Wakida might die for his crime, but not enough to exonerate him by coming forward. Nevertheless, he tries to talk Wakida round, asking why he confessed and if he was pressured by the prosecutors. The Japanese legal system places confessions above all else, but the issue is that Wakida’s confession is the only evidence that links him to the murder. Just because he stole the jewellery doesn’t mean he killed Mrs Munakata. Ironically enough, he’s defended by the victim’s husband (Koreya Senda), an anti-death penalty activist lawyer who agrees to represent him in part to vindicate his principles. Wakida only agrees to cooperate with Munakata and Hamano who is acting as his assistant when he confirms they’re not trying to help out of pity but only for their own self-interest. 

Yet Ochiai might have a point asking why Hamano is certain that Wakida didn’t do it, or why, on beginning to suspect him, he’s trying so hard to exonerate a man who was going to pay for his crime. It’s Hamano’s own suspiciousness that leads him to question his judgement about Wakida and ask himself if his thinking wasn’t too black and white and he should have investigated more thoroughly rather than pressuring Wakida into a confession and charging him. On realising he may have made a mistake, Ochiai puts the prosecution in a difficult position as his boss warns him of the potential reputational damage to the police and prosecutors if they’re shown to have made a mistake with the mild implication that, as he had assumed someone in Hamano’s position would want to, he should just keep quiet and let Wakida hang. 

Surprisingly, however, it only seems to improve the public’s view of the prosecution to be able to see them admit that they made a mistake and try to fix it rather than refuse to change their position. Mystery writer Seicho Matsumoto makes a cameo appearance as a TV pundit who says he admires Ochiai, while the film also uses a real TV show host to interview Ochiai boosting the sense of realism. As it turns out, there was more to the story than even Ochiai or Hamano thought, but still he declares that it’s better to be a fool than a hopeless idiot and that he was right to look for the truth even if it ended up biting him in the behind. The pressure of Hamano’s guilt, however, never really dissipates even as he struggles with himself, trying to find a way to save Wakida and avoid becoming a murderer twice over, without giving himself away. Nothing’s really that black and white after all, and this case wasn’t exactly open and shut, but the conviction that it had to be based on prejudice and circumstantial evidence might be the biggest crime at all no matter how it actually turned out.

Face (顔, Junji Sakamoto, 2000)

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In some ways an innocent’s voyage through the nihilistic landscape of mid-90s Japan, Junji Sakamoto’s Face (顔, Kao) is also a character study of a woman who developed a fear of being seen, in large part because of social prejudice. In a heartbreaking moment, Masako (Naomi Fujiyama) reveals that her father, who left when she was 10, told her that she didn’t have to learn to swim or ride a bike if she didn’t want to. But Masako did want to learn, she just felt she couldn’t because people found her clumsiness “embarrassing”. It’s not completely clear whether Masako’s father said that because he felt bad seeing Masako being picked on by the other kids, or if he too felt ashamed that his daughter was evidently a little different from the other children.

It’s this sense of rejection and loathing that’s manifested in Masako’s bar hostess sister, Yukari (Riho Makise) who is exploitative of her, pressuring her to mend clothing belonging to one of her customers, and becoming physically abusive by tripping her when she refuses. Yukari lies that their mother agrees Masako should be institutionalised, provoking her into a rare trip out of her house running out into the snow in only her slippers and taking a round-trip on a train until Yukari’s gone. The two women are almost polar opposites, and in some ways Yukari’s cruelty may be motived by seeing in Masako’s face the elements of herself that she most fears and dislikes.

Nevertheless, when their mother dies and Yukari implies she plans to turn the family dry cleaner’s into a cafe evicting Masako in the process, Masako ends up snapping and strangling Yukari with her unfinished knitting. In killing Yukari she has, in a sense, freed herself from the oppressiveness of her hate and the inferiority complex it produced in her. Forced on the run on the eve of the Kobe earthquake, she believes the disaster to be her fault, but also takes advantage of the chaos to disappear into a crowd of other displaced persons making their way towards Osaka. It’s there she ends up getting a job at a love hotel under the name of new wave actress “Mariko Kaga,” but every time she starts to settle into a new life and blossoms when surrounded by more supportive presences, her new family quickly crumbles and she’s forced back on the run.

In an ironic twist, many of the ruined men she comes across, some of whom sexually assault her, take on the role of the father she never had. The manager at the love hotel (Ittoku Kishibe) tries to teach her how to ride a bike, though he is privately drowning in gambling debts and about to lose everything. Later she’s sold by a man trying to escape his life as a yakuza to a regular at a bar where she’s been working who bizarrely also begins to teach her to swim. The man who assaulted her originally had lost work because of the earthquake and tried to exorcise his sense of powerlessness by forcing himself on Masako. Her decision to hand him some of the funeral condolence money she stole before leaving is her way of reasserting power over the situation, paying him for this life lesson and shifting the stigma back onto him rather than accept it herself. 

Hiroyuki (Etsushi Toyokawa), the former yakuza, may have sold her as a kind of revenge seeing as he seems to resent her for her difference, but also identifies with her seeing them both as “losers”, which is a label Masako no longer really agrees with. But unlike her, Hiroyuki can no longer escape his fate and the yakuza is not often an occupation you can just give up even if it were not for vague hints at trouble in the city that’s forced him back to pleasant onsen town Beppu on the southern island Kyushu. Even the man that Masako takes a liking to simply because he’s kind to her (Koichi Sato) has recently been made redundant. His wife has left him with their young son and he’s resorted to blackmailing his former employer to get what he’s owed. This breach of the employer-employee contract exemplifies the sense of betrayal among people of this generation who were promised jobs for life under the post-war salaryman model but have been chewed up and spit out by the post-Bubble economy.

Masako, however, is flourishing during her life on the run. Her family had treated her as if she had some kind of learning difficulties and had forced her into a kind of arrested development in which she feared the outside world and had poorly developed social skills. The scars of her trauma are literally manifested on her face after she falls off her bicycle, but it’s true enough that through her various experiences she is able to take on different personas only for her actual face to give her away in the end. Just as after she’d run away, Masako encountered a strange and possibly over-friendly woman in a cafe who is later revealed to be a fugitive, like her on the run for murder, modelled in the real life murderer Kazuko Fukuda who evaded the police for over 14 years through having repeated plastic surgery. Masako never alters her face, in fact it’s ironically her true face that becomes further exposed as she comes into herself thanks to those she meets, but is able to become various other people hinting at all the lives she was denied as Masako the despised sister hunched over a sewing machine. Though contemporary Japan may seem to be a bleak and hopeless place, denying Masako the romantic fulfilment and happy life she longed for, it’s she alone who wants to live, desperately swimming out to sea having been pushed all the way out of Japan but forever in search of new horizons.

The King’s Warden (왕과 사는 남자, Chang Hang-jun, 2026)

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Can a king govern effectively if he does not know his people? Korean historical films are renowned for palace intrigue, but what’s often forgotten is the lives of ordinary subjects living in far off villages for whom the ruler is a distant authority whose efforts are more likely to hamper their lives than help them. At the beginning of Chang Hang-jun’s The King’s Warden (왕과 사는 남자, Wanggwa Saneun Namja), village chief Heung-do (Yoo Hae-jin) goes out to hunt deer which is the only access to meat the villagers seem to have while many of them have only vague memories of ever having even seen hot white rice.

Still, after he’s chased by a tiger, Heung-do is rescued by a nearby village which is in full festival mode celebrating the birthday of the young son of a regular villager. The boy’s father makes fun of Heung-do for eating deer which he says smells bad and offers him some of their lavish banquet. This village used to be poor like his, but at some point they agreed to host an exiled official, the former Minister of Justice. Though the minister was rude and entitled, he soon began to start teaching the local children for something to do resulting in one of them becoming a top scholar. And political realities being what they are, the minister’s supporters began sending lavish gifts to the village to hedge their bets on his eventual rehabilitation. Shortly put, that’s how they’ve all become rich beyond their wildest dreams and all they had to do was put up with someone being difficult and annoying for a short period of time.

Obviously, Heung-do wants this for his village too, but unbeknownst to him they’re sent the deposed king Hong-wi (Park Ji-hoon) who ascended the throne as a child and has been usurped by his uncle. This obviously places them in a precarious position. Heung-do has to report to the Town Office on Hong-wi’s every move fearing that they’ll all be killed if anything happens to him, while the usurpers, led by treacherous courtier Myeong-hoe (Yoo Ji-tae), are actually banking on the fact that Hong-wi won’t be able to adjust to a life of exile having never lived outside of the palace and will likely either die or take his own life. For his own part, Hong-wi seems to have become depressed. He’s on a kind of hunger strike as a protest and later tries to end his life only to be saved Heung-do.

Hong-wi is indeed in a difficult position himself, still only a teenager and likely aware that there is only a small possibility of him surviving very much longer given that others make take up his cause and challenge his uncle’s claim to the throne which makes his mere existence an existential threat. Not having the power to do anything, refusing to eat is his only means of asserting control. Heung-do, meanwhile, is fairly ignorant of all this though tries his best to convey that Hong-wi refusing the food the villagers have prepared for him despite not having enough to eat themselves is both rude and causing them anxiety that perhaps it’s not to his taste and their commonness is killing him. 

It’s this more human kind of interaction that eventually brokers an easier friendship between the villagers the exiled king in which it seems as if Hong-wi would have “proved most royal” if he had not been usurped and continued to reign into adulthood. He has become better acquainted with the way his subjects live, while Myeong-hoe and his ilk are only concerned with power and courtly intrigue rather than the actual business of government. Nevertheless, in the end Heung-do must pick a master. To save the villagers he may need to sacrifice Hong-wi and demonstrate his loyalty to the new regime (who may or may not honour their promises), or else decide to risk being taken down with him if they continue to protect this man they’ve come to see as a friend and who is himself conflicted in the knowledge that his presence places them at risk.

Domestic viewers well acquainted with historical fact will know the direction that this story will eventually take, though the earlier parts of the film are largely concerned with village life in which the villagers great their hardship with good humour. As such, they never really question it but only look for ways to improve their circumstances and settle on making themselves even more subservient to authority, while even an exiled king finds himself entirely powerless within an inherently corrupt feudal system. The growing friendship between Heung-do, the villagers, and Hong-wi has then a poignant quality in their shared sense of futility and the glimpse of what might have been a better society for all if only Hong-wi had been allowed to follow his kingly destiny unfettered.

The King’s Warden opens in UK cinemas 6th March courtesy of Central City Media.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

The Fixer (日本の黒幕, Yasuo Furuhata, 1979)

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Japan was rocked by scandal in 1976 when it came to light that American aviation firm Lockheed had paid the office of then Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka three million dollars funnelled through right-wing fixer Yoshio Kodama to ensure that Japanese airlines such as ANA purchased Lockheed Lockheed L-1011 TriStar passenger jets rather than the McDonnell Douglas DC-10. The disturbing revelations deepened a sense of mistrust in the government which was shown to be inherently corrupt and in constant collusion with nationalist activists and yakuza.

This might be why the figure of the political mastermind hangs heavy over the Japanese paranoia cinema of the 1970s. The Fixer (日本の黒幕 Nihon no Fixer), however, rather ironically began as a vehicle for director Nagisa Oshima. At that time, Toei was struggling as its run of jitsuroku movies began to run out of steam. Producer Goro Kusakabe wanted to make a film about Kodama, who’d been alluded to in the Japanese Godfather series, and thought that getting Oshima to do it would take Toei in a new artistic direction, moving them away from the studio model by bringing in outside auteurist talent. But the problem with that was that an artist like Oshima did not want to work with a typical studio production model and, at the end of the day, what Toei wanted was a commercial film. It also has to be said that as a studio Toei tended to lean towards the right, and the film that was finally produced, directed by action drama specialist Yasuo Furuhata using a script by Koji Takada which Oshima had described as “boring”, was much more sympathetic towards its subject than Oshima would likely have been.

Like the Japanese Godfather, series it’s essentially a Greek tragedy retold as yakuza movie in which Kodama is brought low by a series of betrayals that prevent him realising his dream of an ideal Japan, which in effect means undoing democracy to restore the pre-war militarist regime. The true source of the corruption is then shifted to the prime minister, Hirayama (Ryunosuke Kaneda), a stand-in for Tanaka, who is brought to power by Yamaoka (Shin Saburi), a thinly veiled Kodama, but later betrays him for a shot at a political comeback following a bribery scandal during which Yamaoka is left out to dry. Yamaoka casts himself as the true patriot, and Hirayama as the greedy opportunist who only cares about his own wealth and status. 

Yamaoka’s vision of himself is eventually undercut by a former ally who accuses him of being deluded by his own lust for power, placing a pistol on the table in front of him and suggesting he do the honourable thing. Yamaoka, however, does not want to do that and gives a last speech to his young men explaining that silence is his way of fighting back and that he’ll be vindicated in the end, which he eventually is when Hirayama is arrested. The drama is played out in part by the internal conflict within a young man with a bad leg who first tries to assassinate Yamaoka but is taken in by him and trained up as a potential successor only to be manipulated by his daughter who hands him the dagger Hirayama had returned to Yamaoka when he betrayed him and asks whether he wants to kill a woman or the “real villain”, by which she means Yamaoka but the boy has a different target in mind.

On the other hand, Yamaoka is exposed as having some very weird and cult-like ideas such as breeding a child that has his completely purified blood in his veins by encouraging a relationship between his legitimate daughter and a young man he brought back from China she has no idea is her half-brother born to a Chinese woman Yamaoka murdered to escape Manchuria. Brief mentions are made of Yamaoka’s Manchurian exploits though painted in a more heroic fashion that Kodama’s reality, as in a late speech about how “terrorism” has lost its meaning as some of the young men joining Yamaoka’s militia meditate on his pre-war activities in which he belonged to an organisation that assassinated politicians who advocated for peaceful coexistence with Korea and China. 

That the young assassin, Ikko (Tsutomu Kariba), eventually decides to knife Hirayama as the “real” villain, suggests that the youth of Japan has chosen Yamaoka rather than simply being sick of the political corruption he in effect represents even as others quickly, and perhaps uncritically, leap to his defence buying his claims of having been targeted due to “internal infighting”. While those around him are driven towards their deaths, Yamaoka survives muttering that it’s all for Japan even while finding himself cut loose as rival yakuza factions vie over territory and political influence. Lighting candles at his altar, it’s almost as if these men are human sacrifices designed to bring about his vision of a “better” Japan and chillingly it seems he has no shortage of willing victims.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Anxious Virgin: One More Time, I Love You (Doki Doki ヴァージン　もういちど I LOVE YOU, Shun Nakahara, 1990)

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A cocky young man gets hit by a truck on his way to lose his virginity, but manages to get a heavenly civil servant to give him a second chance in Shun Nakahara’s surprisingly nuanced teen sex comedy, Anxious Virgin: One More Time I Love You (Doki Doki ヴァージン　もういちど I LOVE YOU, Doki Doki Virgin Mo Ichido I Love You). The second in Nikkatsu’s entry in the straight-to-video market, the title might hark back to their Roman Porno days and conjure an image of something salacious and exploitative, yet what the hero Hideki (Yasufumi Hayashi) eventually comes to realise is that there’s no rush when it comes to something like physical intimacy and that it’s important to consider the other person’s feelings along with your own emotional readiness. 

He learns this mainly because he’s abruptly forced into a female body, that of Mari who is the best friend of the innocent Sachiko (Shinobu Nakayama). Much to Hideki’s annoyance, Sachiko has a crush on his old school rival, Kakinuma. Good-looking and successful, Kakinuma is a bit of a cad but also envied by the other boys because he lives in a private annex and has a reputation for bringing girls back there to have sex. Neither Hideki nor any of his friends think much about the girls as people with thoughts and emotions of their own, but fixate solely on the action of sexual intercourse. One of the boys has a weird sexual fantasy about his sister whom he saw naked in the shower. While looking at her, her physical form became divorced from her personhood so that he forgot the taboo of incest and appreciated only the presence of a naked woman in close proximity.

The boys do something similar on coming across a girl from another school who is about to engage in outdoor sexual activity with a boy they know. After he blindfolds her as an ironic way of mitigating her embarrassment, the boys cart him off and begin digitally penetrating the girl themselves without any real thought for her personhood let alone her consent. They hear the boy repeating the phrase “I love you” and come to see it almost as a spell that makes a girl let someone have sex with her. Masao, the most lovelorn, tries this again later in trying to get Hideki in Mari’s body to kiss him, though Hideki is obviously not at all interested. 

By this point, Hideki is interested in Sachiko on an emotional as well as purely sexual level but is hampered by his female body. “Mari” appears to the audience as Hideki throughout, amusingly dressed in old-fashioned prison clothes, though the film only sort of flirts with the idea of same-sex desire. In reality, the conflict that caused Mari to lose her consciousness was that she too was in love with Kakinuma, though the problem now is that Hideki can’t support Sachiko in her romance not only because he has a rivalry with Kakinuma and knows him to be a poor romantic prospect, but because he desires her himself. When he eventually kisses Sachiko, she doesn’t quite know what to make of it. She evidently gives it some thought, but decides two girls dating each other doesn’t seem quite right to her and sets “Mari” up with a date with Masao, which is still accidentally a gay date that Hideki isn’t interested in. 

Thus the film defaults to heteronormativity, if in a sensitive and empathetic fashion. Nevertheless, through his experiences in a female body Hideki begins to come to a greater appreciation of what it’s like for girls. Despite having spent the entire film trying to lose his virginity, he tells Mari’s younger sister Riko that she won’t die if she doesn’t have sex and that he disapproves of her whirlwind romance. He understands both that Sachiko is naive and that Kakinuma is no hero but a destructive predator who just wants to have sex whether the girl wants to or not. Giving up his chance to lose his virginity and risking being dragged to hell, Hideki decides to save Sachiko from being pressured into sex and then engages with her in a conversation about the importance of consent and emotional readiness in which they both agree that “rules and timing” are important when it comes to physical intimacy. What began as a rather raucous teen sex comedy has morphed into a sweet and sensitive coming-of-age drama in which rather than obsessing over the physical act, the hero falls in love and is content to end his life having given voice to his feelings.

Screened as part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Focus on V-Cinema.

Passport to Darkness (暗黒の旅券, Seijun Suzuki, 1959)

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Another of Seijun Suzuki’s early Nikkatsu noirs, Passport to Darkness (暗黒の旅券, Ankoku no Ryoken) starts out like The Lady Vanishes and then turns into the 39 Steps while drawing influence from hardboiled Hollywood movies such as The Big Sleep. It is, however, very much about the confusing landscape of late 1950s Japan in which nothing is quite as it seems and shady forces are constantly operating in the background out of view. “Darkness can descend on our lives just like that, can’t it?” the hero remarks, “there’s only so much an individual can do,” he sighs, “who’s going to protect us?”

Probably not the policeman, who replies that that’s just how Japan is now. Though, in general, the police are doing something even if there are hints they’re also mixed up in this swirling darkness. They don’t really hang on to jazz trumpeter Ibuki (Ryoji Hayama) as a suspect for very long, though they do keep him under a watchful eye just in case. Ibuki marries the singer from his nightclub band and is about to depart on his honeymoon, an all expenses paid gift from his bosses, when he gets off the train to look for a friend who’s running late, Moriwaki. When he gets back on the train, his new wife, Hiromi, is nowhere to be found.

Rather than thinking she may ironically have got off the train to look for him and not made it back on, Ibuki jumps to the conclusion that she’s got cold feet and jilted him before their honeymoon. Though he gets off at the next station, he’s too embarrassed to call any of his friends fearing they’ll make fun of him for being a guy whose wife left right after the wedding. It’s this sense of insecurity that makes him a little less sympathetic, thinking mostly about himself rather than seriously considering something may have happened to Hiromi or that she’s just on the next train. That’s probably why he doesn’t do anything sensible, like going back to their apartment to see if she’s there, and only makes cryptic phone calls before asking a friend to meet him in a bar and explaining the situation. He spends the evening on an endless pub crawl supposedly looking for her while drowning his sorrows. When does eventually get home, he discovers Hiromi dead in their flat having been strangled with a tie. Obviously, this makes him the prime suspect, though the police are unusually open to the idea someone else was involved.

Ibuki turns private detective trying to work out what happened to Hiromi and who might have wanted to hurt her. The police tell him there was heroin in her handbag and they therefore suspect the crime has something to do with drugs, but that doesn’t add up with the Hiromi that Ibuki knew. Either they’re wrong, or Hiromi was somehow hiding a massive drug problem from him and maybe he didn’t know her at all. This sense of uncertainty is echoed in Suzuki’s dreamlike aesethetic which already leans towards the surreal. When the club MC announces Ibuki’s marriage onstage, he dissolves to be replaced by Moriwaki who hands the pair their honeymoon tickets suggesting that sudden appearances, disappearances, and missing time are common in this world. Later Ibuki listens to a secret conversation through a wall of jagged glass echoing the confusing nature of the story he’s beginning to trace.

That story itself largely revolves around drugs and displacement. Hiromi had been looking for her missing brother with the police suggesting he’d probably become a yakuza and might not be worth looking for. Others are motivated solely by a determination to liberate their loved ones from a drug addiction that has been forced on them as a means of control by an organisation that’s dealing drugs from bar called Tsubo on which Ibuki stumbled during his drunken pub crawl. One of the ringleaders, Ishimaru, is said to be from a zaibatsu family, which the heir to a large conglomerate and a member of the economic elite. He mentions a past in the navy and his conversation steers toward the nationalist, lending a nasty flavour to his already shady activities.

Eventually the trail leads back to a Frenchman named Franc and a “gay boy”, to use the parlance of the time, named Kenny who is also trapped due to being a drug user. It’s not particularly unusual to see places like these, essentially host bars where men pay to drink with effeminate male hosts, in films of the time, but Passport to Darkness is particularly sympathetic towards the community. It’s clear that the evil is drugs and that Kenny is an innocent who’s been swept into intrigue. Gay bars and gay people are just normal parts of life, not evidence of a seedy underbelly or the moral turpitude of the post-war society. What is rather surprising is that the film features a kiss between two men, which is pretty progressive for 1959.

Nevertheless, as Ibuki says, there’s not much the individual can do defend against the forces of darkness and even some of his closest friends turned out to be no good, while those he doubted were actually on his side. He keeps getting mysterious letters warning him off all signed “K” which is inconvenient, because most of the people he knows have a claim to the initial, and really it could be anyone. There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer to the question of who is going to take responsibility, but Ibuki simply goes back to his life, deciding music is the best way to honour Hiromi’s memory by playing American jazz in a bar that’s mainly frequented by an international clientele hinting at the nation’s new global ambitions.

Scare Out (惊蛰无声, Zhang Yimou, 2026)

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When a suspected spy gets away with some top secret information, the security services begin to suspect they may have a mole on their hands in Zhang Yimou’s slick espionage thriller, Scare Out (惊蛰无声, Jīngzhé Wúshēng). Possibly inspired by a real-life case in which information regarding a new fighter jet was leaked, the film is supervised by the security services themselves and in part a defence of China’s all powerful surveillance network and technological supremacy that allows them to neutralise threats to national security in record time.

Nevertheless, like some of Zhang’s recent work, it’s surprising that he was able to get away with the depiction of a rogue intelligence officer and potentially not quite on level actions from the security services even if they’re eventually vindicated by a final twist. When we’re first introduced to Huang (Zhu Yilong), he’s hot on the trail of foreign spy Nathan whom they assume to be receiving confidential information regarding a new stealth system for fighter jets leaked by a scientist who is desperate to leave the country (Lei Jiayin). Huang is shot in the back by an arrow, while his colleague takes one to the neck and is killed. Though they manage to arrest Nathan, he’s almost killed when the box he’s carrying spontaneously combusts burning the contents.

It’s at this point that things start to go wrong for Huang as his former colleague Zhao Hong (Song Jia) returns to lead the team and he’s one of three suspects for a possible mole alongside his second in command Yan Di (Jackson Yee), and their drone operator Chan Yi who killed the sniper either accidentally or on purpose by ramming him so that he fell from the upper levels while trying to escape. Until now, Huang had been depicted as an upright and dedicated officer who absolutely could not be the mole, but we soon discover that he in fact is, or at least that he was in the process of being turned by foreign asset Bai Fan (Yang Mi). With his marriage falling apart, he fell right into her honey trap and is now being blackmailed but theoretically still has the opportunity to turn this around if only he can hold out and find a way to do the right thing.

Then again, the film deliberately wrong-foots us by occasionally suggesting that maybe Huang isn’t the mole after all or that there may be more than one or something larger going on all together. It’s not really revealed why Bai Fan has betrayed her country to work for a foreign intelligence agency led by a Westerner living in China and with incredibly good Mandarin. The foreign agency evidently thinks this region’s important enough to be worth creating a long-term network of sleeper agents, while the way the security services discuss the stolen stealth data makes it sound as if they’re already in a war and very much don’t want “the enemy” to get hold of this information. 

The real action, however, is the interplay between accused Huang and Yan Di whose relationship takes on intensely homoerotic quality. Just as Huang is torn between his duty as an intelligence officer and the predicament he finds himself in, Yan Di is torn by the desire to protect his friend while simultaneously avoiding implicating himself. They must either betray each other, themselves, China, or all three, which isn’t an ideal set of choices. Meanwhile, the spy craft on show has a very traditional quality with smartphones secured in rubbish bins in public lavatories, dead drops, and mysterious potions that can destroy evidence, all of which suggests that there are ways in which this vast surveillance network is in fact fallible and can’t protect against every eventuality even if it’s just someone leaving a bathroom in a different outfit than they were wearing when they went in.

Though Zhang does his best to lend the city a near future gloss as a techno paradise in which there are no secrets, he opts for an unusual fast editing style which makes the narrative much more difficult to follow while encouraging an atmosphere of intense paranoia where everything moves at breakneck speed and nothing is ever certain. Like his recent films Under the Light and Article 20, however, it’s a curiously anonymous affair and bears few of the hallmarks of Zhang’s filmmaking as a fifth generation director opting instead for a fairly generic, mainstream blockbuster aesthetic. Nevertheless, in its twists and turns along with the interplay between the two leads the film nods back towards the intrigue of Infernal Affairs and a history of Heroic Bloodshed less commonly found in Mainland crime dramas.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Kyu-chan, Draw Your Sword (九ちゃん刀を抜いて, Masahiro Makino, 1963)

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Kyu Sakamoto was a hugely popular singing star in the 1960s best known internationally for the smash hit Ue wo Muite Aruko (Sukiyaki) which, somewhat incongruously, features in this jidaigeki comedy, Kyu-chan Draw Your Sword (九ちゃん刀を抜いて, Kyu-chan Katana wo Nuite), directed by one of the masters of the samurai movie, Masahiro Makino. Adapted from the novel by Ippei Okamoto, the film is essentially a vehicle for Sakamoto as indicated by the inclusion of his name in the title even though he plays a character called “Sangoro”.

The joke is that Sangoro is incredibly lazy and can hardly lift his head off the pillow while his ageing parents are struggling to feed themselves. If they don’t find a way to get him working soon, they’ll all starve to death but Sangoro seems incapable of understanding. The parents try to think up various jobs he could do without having to exert himself and eventually come up with Kyokaku, or “town knight”, a man about town of the Edo era somewhere between street tough and vigilante. In fact he even ends up meeting some legendary characters such as Banzuiin Chobe (Eitaro Shindo) who became a kind of Robin Hood figure in later literature standing up for the common man against the abuses of the samurai class. 

When he goes off to the city to become a Kyokaku because he figures starving to death would be too much effort, Sangoro’s father cautions him not to be too lazy to draw his sword even though it’s rusty and unlikely to do much damage. Sengoro does, however, take his ambition seriously and is keen to make a name for himself in Edo which he first does by becoming the blood brother of Gonbei (Chiyonosuke Azuma), one of Banzuiin’s men. Though his clumsy attempts to fight him don’t bode well for Sangoro’s career, Gonbei takes him on precisely because he’s fun to have around even if he is a bit useless and sometimes you need guys like that too. Introducing him to area’s top courtesan Takamado (Yoko Minamida), they hope to set the cat among the pigeons with a local gang that’s been harassing them led by the irritating Mizuno (Fumitake Omura) and Shirogoro (Koshiro Harada).

Though the film may be, in a way, a sort of satire poking fun at aimless post-war youth that lacks ambition in comparison to their parents’ generation who bore the brunt of wartime privation. Naive and childish, Sangoro is a well-meaning bumbler, but Takamado unexpectedly likes him precisely for these qualities. She hates men like Mizuno who are obsessed with proving their masculinity and finds it refreshing that Sangoro is not afraid to show his weakness. Just like Gonbei, she appreciates him not for his command of the sword or imposing air of authority, but simply because he’s an uncomplicated good person and fun to be around.

Mizuno and Shigoro are, by contrast, cruel and abusive Tokugawa vassals, who, it’s implied, have a habit of murdering sex workers during their New Year endurance tests. Sangoro is keen to save a young woman, Omitsu (Yumiko Kokonoe), after her father did him a favour and explained he needed 25 ryo to buy back her contract after she agreed to sacrifice herself to get the money for her mother’s medical treatment. Which is to say, she’s the opposite of Sangoro. It turns out that Takamado has a sad story of her own staged by Makino using kabuki-esque sets and effects to dramatise her flashback as she explains her samurai father took his own life after a prisoner he was watching disappeared. Though in another film this might lead to a violent confrontation challenging the evil samurai, in this version a bizarre misundersanding is revealed to have caused the death of Takamado’s father leading to another act of levelling as the supposed villain agrees to give them his secret recipe for pickles with an exclusive license to manufacture it for three years before it’s essentially made open source for the good of the people. Thus Sangoro essentially becomes a shopkeeper and releases both Omitsu and Takamado from their position as indentured sex workers, restoring both their birthright and their freedom basically by being nice and the right kind of righteous while Mizuno and Shigoro just end up embarrassed when all their posturing and obsession with their samurai status appears to mean little in a world in which the merchant has indeed become king.

Night King (夜王, Jack Ng Wai-Lun, 2026)

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Times are changing in the Hong Kong of Jack Ng Wai-Lun’s Lunar New Year comedy, Night King (夜王). Reuniting the team behind the megahit A Guilty Conscience, Ng paints the tiny enclave of old-fashioned hostess bars at its centre as the last bastion of a disappearing culture where a good-hearted manager holds out against the encroaching forces of capitalism in the form of his ex-wife, Madam V (Sammi Cheng), who is determined to buy the club and rule all of East Tsim Sha Tsui. 

Back in the economic boom of the 80s and 90s, Foon (Dayo Wong) ruled the roost as the famed “Night King” of the entertainment district, but these days clubs are closing reft, left, and centre, while his EJ is one of the only holdouts left alongside Madam V’s Muses. Madam V has poached several of Foon’s best girls which is why his bar is understaffed, but there’s no real denying that the place is on its way out because customer behaviour has changed. Madam V bristles when her boss’ nerdy son Prince Fung (Siuyea Lo) suggests young people don’t go to places like these any more and they’re better off turning it into a modern nightclub instead, but he does have a point. Most of the clientele are elderly men who might be rich but won’t be very coming for very much longer while there’s no one really there to take their place. The younger men who do come, like Fung, on occasion, are there because, as Foon says, hostess bars are naturally places where information circulates freely.

To that extent, Madam V represents an incursion of modern capitalism as she ruthlessly takes her red pen to the books and insists on getting rid of unpopular girls. Rather than the current system, she suggests switching to a pageant style in which the girls are brought in en masse with the customer taking his pick, which somehow seems even more sexist and sleazy than before. Madam V’s ambition seems to have been one reason for the marriage’s failure and it’s clear that she resents Foon for being a soft touch. As she says, he lends money to every girl that asks him and is actually quite supportive of them in a way that makes this business seem less exploitative than it might otherwise be. In any case, he’s determined to hang on to his long timers even if some of them have aged out of active hostessing while Madam V wants to bring in her army of soulless and identical ringers.

So the question is really, is it better to go down with the ship clinging to the past or join the capitalist revolution alongside men like Fung who no longer value Hong Kong and do most of their business abroad. Of course, there might be another way if Madam V and Foon can find their way back to working together, but the first problem is the petty princeling with a sexist chip on his shoulder because he can’t accept it that his sister is a better businesswoman and the likely heir to his father’s empire. His family seem to have written him off already, and sadly they may have been right. Giving himself a glam up, Fung shows up at the club like a playboy throwing his money around, but has secretly teamed up the widow of Foon’s late Triad godfather to screw over Madam V for the purposes revenge, while Mrs Wong simply wants rid of the club because she couldn’t stand her husband’s involvement in the seedier side of his business as a violent gangster. 

As in so many recent Hong Kong films, the idea seems to be that it’s better to let go of the past and take with you only what you can carry. Foon and Madam V eventually open a new club that’s fully their own rather than inherited or run on behalf of a backer. In essence, it’s still a hostess bar, but in a different part of town and more modern in sensibility, skewing young professional rather than elderly billionaire. Foon too is dressing in a more contemporary fashion, abandoning his colourful open-neck shirts with visible medallion and jeans for a smart suit jacket and turtle neck. Nevertheless, Ng seems to be looking back rather than forwards in his directorial style including typical elements of 80s and 90s cinema such as slow motion, freeze frames, and fade to black transitions perhaps to echo the ways in which Foon is stuck in the past. The eventual message though is one of solidarity and creating your own space outside of whatever external forces may be constraining it.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)