Lone Samurai (Josh C. Waller, 2025)

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To a certain way of thinking, life too is a suicide mission. Faced with a Mongol invasion, small numbers of samurai were dispatched with the instructions to kill as many as possible to deplete the numbers making it to the mainland where, presumably, other warriors would be waiting to repel them. They do not expect to stop the invasion, which is eventually frustrated by a heaven-sent typhoon, only to die while protecting the mainland and implicitly those they love who live on it, though that may be a purely individual concern not really connected to the orders they’ve been given.

Washing up on an island he assumes to be uninhabited and appears somewhat like paradise, Riku (Shogen) is stranded in a kind of purgatorial space. He no longer has a mission or prospect of return and so he is merely waiting to die and at first chooses to do so in ritual suicide after hallucinating the voices of his family. Prevented from doing so, he then decides to build a torii gate so that he might better commune with the world beyond, but is again prevented, much like the invasion was twice prevented by a “divine wind”. Now, however, he’s been taken captive by a cannibal tribe who don’t seem to like it that he built one of his arches on their land. They claim they saved him from himself and that he is “no warrior like hardened earth”. Nevertheless, they plan to kill him and consume parts of his flesh, which would make him permanently part of them.

In some ways, the film seems to be about the death cult at the heart of samurai culture, but also the ways in which a man will cling to life when it looks like it will be taken from him. The setting is pure pulp as echoed in the “samurai vs cannibals” concept, and perhaps for that reason uncomfortably ends up positioning the samurai as a kind of civilising force attacking the barbarism of the (presumably) indigenous tribe. Even the witch doctor figure (Yayan Ruhian), impressed by Riku’s self-administered medical techniques, concedes that Riku is a “demon” come to punish them for their wicked ways of human sacrifice and cannibalism, which suggests that either this culture is new or others of them also see something “wrong” in it. The island creatures, including an inquisitive Komodo dragon, seem to side with Riku, turning against the cruel islanders and assisting his survival.

But in other ways, Riku may not have been so different. He was sent to kill as many as possible and was prevented from doing so, so he completes his mission now just against a different target. He has frequent flashbacks to his sons playing games of war, the strategic advice he gave them about higher ground being better, and his own conviction that he could not dance because dance may be incompatible with the life of a warrior even if it’s death he’s waltzing on the battlefield. In the poems he writes on random rocks, sometimes in blood, he states that now he collects only thoughts rather than heads and longs for the days of stinking skulls. It is, after all, easier to be a man of action killing mindlessly and living only for survival than it is to remember what you’ve done and meditate on it.

For the moment, though, all Riku is focused on is taking the heads of these men who thought they could kill and eat him. He makes no real attempt to save the other man who’s their current sacrificial victim, but seems to promise he will avenge him. Riku cannot, after all, take out the whole room in one go, but otherwise skilfully picks them off in small groups picking up their weapons as he goes much as they tried to use his broken sword for their own bloody ends. Eventually, he’ll reclaim his other sword too, for the final confrontation back at the beach on the shores of life and death, preventing the men’s escape by burning all their boats. He is, in fact, fighting back against death, an enemy that never be defeated but only held off. Nevertheless, the action sequences featuring Iko Uwais’ stunt team build with a ferocious momentum that continues until the final bloody showdown.

Lone Samurai is released on Digital, 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray & DVD in the US March 17 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Janur Ireng (Janur Ireng: Sewu Dino the Prequel, Kimo Stamboel, 2025)

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If something seems to good to be true, it probably is. Sabdo (Marthino Lio) and his sister Intan (Nyimas Ratu Rafa) might be too young to know any better, but even they have their doubts when a mysterious man shows up after their house has burnt down claiming to be an estranged uncle. Their late father never mentioned having a brother or any family at all and did not ask for him when he was dying. As the siblings will discover, there’s a reason for that and they may not want this particular familial legacy no matter the trappings it comes with. 

A prequel to his previous film A Thousand Days (Sewu Dino), Kimo Stamboel’s Janur Ireng is partly a metaphor for the exploitative practices of the super rich who use their wealth to manipulate or abuse those with lesser means. Having grown up without much money and fallen into poverty after their father died to the extent that Intan had had to leave education, being suddenly adopted by their wealthy uncle plunges the pair into a new world they are not altogether equipped to understand even without all the weird black magic rituals and sense of unease pervading the country mansion. Intan complains that the house has creepy vibes, and there is something gothic about it aside from feeling lost amid its vastness. Intan dislikes sleeping alone because her new room is simply far too big, even it didn’t turn out to come with some unexpected residents. It’s wandering around the house that she discovers something shocking, unsure if it’s something she wasn’t supposed to see or if she was guided there by a mysterious force.

Sabdo, meanwhile, is taken on as his uncle’s heir and protege. He discovers that Arjo (Tora Sudiro) is trying to regain land lost to the family including a banana plantation he days will be his to run, though Arjo seems pretty wealthy already. He is, though, on frosty terms the “7 Families” who run things in the local area and appears to want to reassert his status. With little in the way of explanation, he gets Sabdo to repeatedly sacrifice goats and do other strange things “to protect the family”, which Sabdo goes along with because he doesn’t quite know how to refuse and is confused by this strange new life. But on the other hand, Sabdo is a stranger here. He’s only told that he’s a member of the family and has no other connection with it or proof that it’s true. His loyalty really is to Intan, and it may be that he stays and does these increasingly weird rituals because Arjo promised Intan what he couldn’t give her in sending her to school and allowing her to fulfil her dream of going to university and getting a good job. A friend had needled her a little bit about ending up like another girl who married young, laying bare the patriarchal nature of the society in which Intan is imprisoned even before finding herself more literally locked up in her uncle’s house. 

Even if Sabdo thinks he finds allies in this world, they too may be using him for their own ends and wielding the power of family against him. Arjo claims their success is down to the patronage of a demonic entity that keeps them safe from other supernatural creatures which what has made their family so wealthy and powerful, but there are reasons their father decided to leave this place even If it meant giving up on the privilege he was born with. There is definitely “a lot wrong with this house” as Sabdo says, though he only makes up his mind to leave it when he realises the threat it poses to Intan. She, however, has already been corrupted by the house as its ghosts and malevolent entities begin to get to her. Kimo Stamboel ups the ante with a series of increasingly bizarre sequences of severed eye balls and torn out hearts, culminating in another kind of ritual disrupted by a once in a generation act of black magic that sees party guests literally tearing their own heads off and continuing to dance. That does not, however, seem to be the end of it for Sabdo whose dark family legacy continues to overshadow his life in ironic ways as he does his best to escape the house his uncle built.

Trailer (English subtitles)

XX: Beautiful Weapon (XX ダブルエックス 美しき凶器, Kazuo Komizu, 1993)

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Though the title may suggest something more in line of exploitation cinema, Kazuo “Gaira” Komizu’s XX: Beautiful Weapon (XX ダブルエックス 美しき凶器, XX: Utsukushiki Kyoki) is more of a mood piece that harks back to classic noir coupled with the erotic thrillers of the 1980s. Though inspired by a short story by hard-boiled master Arimasa Osawa, the film nevertheless adds some political subtext and gives its heroine a much happier ending echoing the underlying themes of fairytale romance.

Indeed, wisecracking hitman/piano player Sakagami (Masao Kusakari) paints himself as a lovelorn prince come to awaken Sleeping Beauty from her slumber and free her from her imprisonment in a dead-end cottage in the middle of nowhere. He begins, however, as a clueless but intrigued hitman on his way out thanks to an apparent inability to keep his mouth shut or lay off the booze. Middle man Yoshizawa (Ren Osugi) drops into his bar, he says just to kill time, though perhaps changing his mind and deciding not to send Sakagami on this particular job. 

A homoerotic frisson colours their interaction, as it does it with the other assassin, a man who runs a coffee shop and has apparently supplanted Sakagami as the hitman of choice. Yoshizawa, however, also has forbidden desires for his charge whom he raised like a daughter and trained in her trade. Nevertheless, he is fairly powerless as the underling of an increasingly paranoid political fixer, Kokubu (Takeshi Kato), who orders him to take care of a bank manager about to blow the whistle on his dodgy dealings and then to take out the assassin too just to be on the safe side. He’s installed the woman (Masumi Miyazaki) in the cottage for just this reason, a conveyor belt killing system in which she knocks off her targets in the middle of coitus and Yoshizawa burns the bodies to make them disappear. Now she knows too much, it’s time to get rid of her too. 

Yoshizawa isn’t onboard with his plan, but find it’s difficult to defy his boss while otherwise worried about the woman’s mental state as she has evidently taken to drink to escape the emotional toll of her unusual line of work. Yet it’s her crying herself to sleep that causes Sakagami to fall in love with her as he peeks in from outside, again like a fairytale figure, observing how she kills the coffee shop guy and making mental notes for when his turn comes around. He quickly realises that she is blind, but pretends not to be, which gives her an advantage in the dark denied to her targets. Her blindness is also, in its way, a symbol of her innocence in that she does not see the darkness of the world all around her and only continues in her work because she doesn’t want anyone else to be forced to do it while, in other ways, hoping to show her love and loyalty to those who raised her. 

Even when Sakagami offers to rescue her, she refuses in fear of what the outside world holds for her. She fears that the dead-end cottage is the only place where she can be “normal”, while outside it she’d be a blind woman unable to navigate the seeing world. Though Sakagami offers to be her guide dog, the surprisingly upbeat ending suggests that she only returns for him once she has achieved independence along with her revenge on those who imprisoned her in the cottage. It is indeed a dead-end place, a liminal space where people only go to die and from which there is no other escape. The woman would most likely have met her own end there, if it were not for Sakagami. The city meanwhile has its own sense of melancholy as a kind of lost paradise filled with the radiating darkness of the corruption of men like Kokubu pulling strings in the shadows. Even so, the woman and Sakagami eventually find a kind of escape in their fairytale romance guided by his gentle piano music and the vague hope of a quiet life free of death and killing having successfully bounced back from their mutual dead ends into an open-ended future.

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

The Pollen of Flowers (화분, Ha Gil-jong, 1972)

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Park Chung-hee kept a tight rein on cinema which he saw as an important political tool and means of communication. That’s not to say, however, that criticising his authoritarian regime was impossible, but that criticism was often expressed in unexpected or abstract ways. The debut film of Hollywood-trained director Ha Gil-jong, The Pollen of Flowers (화분, Hwabun), was adapted from a novel by Yi Hyoseok that was published in 1939 when Korea was under Japanese rule but now speaks directly to the contemporary era as a young man and woman long for escape from the oppressive atmosphere of the “Blue House”.

The Blue House is the name for the residence of Korea’s president and where Park Chung-hee lived at the time, but within the context of the film, it’s inhabited by the mistress of a wealthy businessman, Se-ran (Choi Ji-hee), and her younger sister, Mi-ran (Yoon So-ra). The relationship between the sisters is, however, much more like mother and daughter with Se-ran repeatedly stating that Mi-ran is “everything” to her and that she must grow up to become a “great woman”. The slightly uncomfortable implication is that she is encouraging a possible relationship between Mi-ran and her patron Hyeon-ma (Namkoong Won) or at least that by “great woman” she means Mi-ran should be the partner of a great man who moves within their social circles. Ominously, however, the film opens with Mi-ran discovering that all the fish in their pond have died making it clear that the water here is poisoned and the atmosphere rancid. 

It’s not exactly clear how old Mi-ran is intended to be, only that Se-ran had been worried that hadn’t yet started menstruating. She’s spent her entire life in the cosseted environment of the Blue House and knows nothing of the world outside. That she gets her period for the first time when her father brings his secretary/secret lover Dan-ju (Hah Myung-joong) to the house suggests that she has, in a sense, been liberated by his arrival. For whatever reason, Se-ran had tried to warn her off him. She appears jealous while implying that Dan-ju is a dangerous social climber who threatens the integrity of her household. Mi-ran replies that you shouldn’t judge someone because of their background, but in a fit of pique also refers to Dan-ju as a “servant” which hurts both his feelings and his male pride.

But Dan-ju himself is something of a cypher whose motivations are often unclear. Having grown up working class, he’s risen in the world through complicity with Hyeon-ma’s authoritarian rule. As Se-ran says, Hyeon-ma is infatuated with him but perhaps more as a symbol of his overall control. He reminds Dan-ju that he controls his future and repeatedly asks him if he wants to go back to his old life of being a “scumbag” not quite realising that Dan-ju may have become fed up with his degradation and no longer thinks this kind of success is worth it. Hyeon-ma refers to Dan-ju as his “dream and ambition,” even going so far as to say he’d like to start a new life with him, though this is obviously not something that would be considered publicly acceptable in the Korea of the early 1970s. The film is often referred to as the first to depict a same-sex relationship, but it’s one motivated more by power than by love. It’s not clear if Hyeon-ma is so convinced that Mi-ran is completely safe with Dan-ju because he believes him to be interested only in men, or if he is certain that his control over him is absolute, while Dan-ju may not actually be interested in men at all and is only submitting himself to Hyeon-ma’s attentions in return for social advancement.

What he comes to represent for each is freedom. After running away, Mi-ran explains that she was happy with her life within the Blue House, in other words under authoritarianism, because it treated her well and so she could think of no other happiness. But meeting Dan-ju has shown her that happiness is possible outside of it. Love is a force that threatens the social order, and now Mi-ran resents her tightly controlled life and longs for the freedom Dan-ju represents over the patriarchal oppression represented by Hyeon-ma to which Se-ran has wholly submitted herself. Now that she’s committed to the regime, she cannot permit Mi-ran to leave it and tries to convince her to study music abroad and date an international pianist who could help career. Hyeon-ma, meanwhile, reacts in jealousy and frustration. He beats Dan-ju and throws him in his shed echoing the torture and imprisonment of dissidents that took place under Park’s regime. 

As time passes, however, something evidently goes wrong with Hyeon-ma’s business causing him to flee in a hurry abandoning Se-ran and Mi-ran to their fates. The ominous maid who has been dropping rats through their windows, eventually tries to release Dan-ju with whom she has some kind of intimate connection, with the consequence that he haunts the mansion like a ghost. Mi-ran appears to have reassimilated, dancing with another man while wearing what looks very like wedding a dress, but her desire for freedom is reawakened by Dan-ju’s return. The house itself is then stormed by the revolutionary force of Hyeon-ma’s creditors who are not exactly noble avengers. They raid the place looting his possessions to get back what they’re owned, even going so far as to cut off Se-ran’s finger to take her ring and pulling out her gold teeth. The message seems to be that the dictator will probably get away (Park didn’t, he was assassinated by the head of his own security forces), but a heavy price will be paid for complicity when the regime falls, as all regimes eventually do. 

The Woman Who Touched Legs (足にさわった女, Yasuzo Masumura, 1960)

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Busho Sawada’s serialised novel had been adapted several times before with the first released shortly after its publication in 1926, but this “modernised” version directed by Yasuzo Masumura, The Woman Who Touched Legs (足にさわった女, Ashi ni Sawatta Onna), is tailor-made for the post-war era as the titular woman heads off in search of the old Japan only to learn that it no longer exists and what little of it remains is being sold off for golf courses and ever expanding American airbases whose noisy aircraft fly constantly overhead.

To that extent, Saya (Machiko Kyo) is an embodiment of aimless post-war youth. Her father was accused of being a spy and took his own life while her mother worked herself to death when she was just a child. Though she travels with a rather dim young man who refers to her as his older sister, they are not actually related by blood and seem to have belonged to the same community of street criminals in Osaka along with their “big sister” Haruko (Haruko Sugimura) who has since moved back to Atsugi which is Saya’s “hometown”. Since her parents’ deaths, she’s been obsessed with the idea of revenge and pickpocketing money to save for a giant memorial service to show the relatives who chased her family out of town how well she’s done for herself. But when she arrives, she can’t even find the place she’s looking for. A policeman flips through a series of ancient, handwritten ledgers looking for evidence of people with her surname and suggests they’ve all left town. Even the last one left is the wife of an adopted son who plans to move to Tokyo after their house is purchased by developers who want to build a golf course.

The golf course may be a symbol of Japan’s increasing prosperity, but the airbases seem to hint more at a sense of corruption and oppression. Saya’s “hometown” is a mythical concept that belongs to an idealised vision of a pastoral Japan before the war that she unconsciously wants to return to. Her mother spoke of a small settlement of perhaps 30 houses, a village society with a river running through it. The village has now, however, been swallowed by the airbase and, in fact, erased so that no one even quite remembers it. Saya is left feeling that she no longer has a hometown, and ironically asks policeman Kita to arrest her so she can go back to prison, which is, perhaps, where her heart truly lies. At least, it’s much quieter than here without any noisy aircraft flying overhead.

Nevertheless, Kita (Hajime Hana) is a fairly bumbling policeman and the film opens with what turns out to be part of a book set in a lawless Japan where people gamble, party, and openly sell guns on an ordinary train. Kita is currently on holiday, which he’s been forced to take even though he doesn’t really want to. He’s technically powerless for the moment, but continually complains that he’s not allowed to arrest Saya unless he catches her in the act of pickpocketing. It’s clear that the pair have feelings for each other it’s inconvenient to admit, and all this talk of “arrest” maybe more a kind of metaphor in which Saya secretly wants to be caught by Kita with the snapping of the handcuffs akin to the putting of a ring on a finger. The pair effectively lead each other on a merry dance with Saya ironically eventually chasing the policeman rather than the other way around.

The film does open rather salaciously with a closeup of a woman’s legs in fishnet tights followed by a kickline, and Machiko Kyo does indeed play up her sexy image to play the beautiful pickpocket who uses her body as a tool to mesmerise much to Haruko’s disapproval. Besides Kita, she’s followed by a rather louche writer (Eiji Funakoshi) who declares that he doesn’t need models, though evidently captivated by her, while declaring himself too successful and overworked. He doesn’t want more money, he just wants some free time and no one seems to want to let him have any, though he doesn’t exactly get a lot of writing done on this wild goose chase looking for Saya’s missing hometown. Absurd as it is, this unlikely rom-com between a beautiful pickpocket and bumbling policeman does at least end in a moment both of constraint and liberation as Saya finds herself content with her famous legs cuffed and Kita content to wear a different hat as they ride off on a decidedly unusual honeymoon.

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)