Author: Hayley Scanlon

A Bloodthirsty Killer (殺人魔 / 살인마, Lee Yong-min, 1965)

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Clearly influenced by the classic Japanese ghost cat movie and the work of Nobuo Nakagawa, Lee Yong-min’s nightmarish slice of gothic horror The Bloodthirsty Killer (殺人魔 / 살인마, Salinma) winds a tale of female revenge though somewhat incongrusouly positioning the vengeful spirit’s oblivious husband as the hero who must attempt to save his family by exposing the corruption at its centre. That corruption is intensely and exclusively female but informed mainly by entrenched patriarchy along with growing anxieties amid increasing wealth disparity. 

As in Nakagawa’s The Lady Vampire, a woman makes a surprise reappearance 10 years after being declared dead looking exactly as she had the last time her husband saw her while also featuring in a painting though this time not in the nude but melting as soon as the confused hero, Simok (Lee Ye-chun), picks it up for a closer look. Lee opens with an incredibly gothic, dreamlike sequence in which a creepy man watches Simok walking in the rain before taking him to a gallery that turns out to be entirely empty. A security guard informs him that the exhibition is over, the painting of Aeja (Do Kum-bong) the only one remaining. It also transpires that Simok has made his trip on the one day a year ghosts roam the earth, as the creepy taxi driver points out gesturing towards a field which appears to be full of white-clothed figures. Eventually he arrives at an eerie house in the woods where he meets the main who painted the portrait only to see him murdered by Aeja while the painter survives long enough to hand him the painting and explain that it contains “a secret”.

This secret will relate closely to Simok’s family which on his return home we can see is affluent and apparently happy. Simok lives in a large, Western-style house that is perfectly primed for gothic horror. When he tries to explain to his wife, Hyesuk (Lee Bin-hwa), what he thinks has happened, a cabinet door mysteriously opens on its own before the couple begin hearing the screams of Simok’s mother who claims a ghost tried to strangle her in her room. All things considered, it does not actually take them very long to agree that ghosts are real and they’re being targeted by one though the reason remains obscure to all, or perhaps to all but Hyesuk whose demeanour immediately changes. Despite having gone into a frenzy when her eldest daughter Mihwa was snatched by the ghost, she quickly makes her way to her hidden stash exclaiming that she’s still “young and rich” and plans to enjoy the rest of her life. The ghost can take her kids, but it won’t get her. 

This is of course entirely contrary to contemporary codes of motherhood especially as we realise that one of the causes of Aeja’s downfall was her childlessness. Three years into her marriage with Simok, she had born no children and earned the animosity of her mother-in-law (Jeong Ae-ran) who it seems did not really like her and felt that she did not live up to her traditional ideas of idealised femininity. Perhaps partly for aesthetic reasons seeing as she is a ghost, Aeja dresses exlcuvely in hanbok in contrast to Hyesuk who in flashbacks is seen in only Western clothing and declares herself jealous and resentful not only of the couple’s material comfort but of how happy they seem to be. A kind of poor relation, Hyesuk plots revenge on societal unfairness in wilfully disrupting Simok’s household by manipulating patriarchal social codes in causing Simok to believe Aeja has been having an affair during his lengthy business trips to Japan.

By the same token, she also takes advantage of the grandmother’s affair with a married doctor (Namkoong Won) which is taboo on several levels the first simply being the existence of sexual desire in a middle-aged woman. Later, once she has been possessed by the ghost cat, Simok’s mother will similarly manipulate him in claiming that she has spent all her life in his service clinging to the memory of her dead husband who left her widowed at 30 as an advocation of idealised womanhood. Though Simok has realised that she was no longer his mother but a ghost cat on catching sight of her reflection, he was unable to kill her because of all her reminders about her maternal suffering. It’s the desire to maintain this facade that encourages her to reject Aeja after Hyesuk engineers her walking in on her mother-in-law and the doctor, insisting that Hyesuk, who is pandering to her, would make a much better daughter-in-law than the righteous and wronged Aeja. 

Aeja’s revenge is also against all of these oppressive social codes that have contributed to her demise though it was other women who eventually brought it about in their enforcement and manipulation of the codes of femininity. Recalling a moment from Hajime Sato’s Ghost of the Hunchback in a which a shamaness drops in having spotted all the evil emanating from the house, another woman later turns up and seems to want to help giving Simok a magic talisman he eventually uses to save his kids who have been imprisoned, perhaps for their own safety, inside some Buddhist statues. In contrast to Aeja’s rage, Hyesuk’s greed, and the mother-in-law’s shame, the mysterious woman is gentle and self-assured if a little eerie. Just as a cross can stop a vampire, so a Buddhist rosary can fend off a ghost cat while it’s an appeal to Buddha that eventually helps to break the curse transforming the portrait into a lotus instead. 

In any case, Lee adds a playful irony to the genre as the grandmother in particular begins to take on feline mannerisms, hissing and pawing at the Buddhist statues while licking her granddaughter’s face in a way even her grandson Woong realises is “disgusting” and not something his grandmother was usually accustomed to doing. In a nod to Yotsuya Kaidan, Aeja’s metamorphosis into a vengeful ghost is accompanied by a loss of her hair, symbolising her loss of femininity, along with a large disfigurement over her eye that has become closely associated with that of Oiwa. Then again, he also has fun with a transformation scene as the grandmother is defeated and turns back into a cat complete with a tiny dress that shrinks with her. What he otherwise conjures is however an eerie sense of dread hanging over a superficially happy home with a terrifying secret at its centre, though what it does in the end suggest with its ambiguous messaging is that the father will eventually have to take responsibility for his family and play an active role in the domestic space if he is to escape this very particular curse of familial corruption.

Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius (サトラレ, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2001)

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What would life be like if your every thought were audible for miles? Adapted from the manga by Makoto Sato, Katsuyuki Motohiro’s Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius (サトラレ, Satorare) considers how ironically isolating such a talent may turn out to be as the sufferer finds themselves withdrawing from others in embarrassment while wider society begins to resent being unable to tune out of their every inane thought or avoid being hurt by hearing something no one would ever say out loud even if they thought it privately. 

The “Committee for the Preservation of the Specially Gifted” is dedicated to protecting the so-called “Transparents” whose thoughts are audible for a 10m radius though they have no control or even idea that it is happening. They’ve started an extensive public information campaign to reduce the stigma held against them because as they claim Transparents are a valuable natural resource mainly as they all have super high IQ and are at the forefront of technological advancement. Then again this extensive campaign seems like overkill as there are only currently seven confirmed Transparents on record, but in a minor twist the campaign is necessary because it’s essential that the Transparents never find out that their thoughts are public, the first apparently having taken their own life because of the intense embarrassment of trying to live without any kind of privacy. 

This is the first ethical problem with the Transparent program which is curiously contradictory in its approach. The government could easily have said that Kenichi (Masanobu Ando), the sole survivor of a plane crash at three years old plucked from the wreckage when rescuers heard his internal monologue begging for help, had died and raised him in a lab, but instead they choose to return him to his grandmother in a designated Transparent town where they provide him with the illusion of a “normal” life while simultaneously micromanaging his existence. Their problem now is that he’s qualified as a doctor and wants to practice, but clinical medicine is obviously an occupation which requires discretion. Patients overhearing his “real” thoughts might not be helpful to their recovery, while he can hardly claim patient doctor confidentially when he’s likely to leak private medical details simply in the course of his work. Meanwhile, it tuns out that he’s already invented a revolutionary cure for athlete’s foot which is another reason why the council want to manipulate him into shifting towards research rather than clinical practice. 

That’s why they’ve dispatched military psychologist Yoko (Kyoka Suzuki) who specialises in Transparents hoping that she can find a way to bend him to their will, but gradually she begins to come to a new understanding of what his life is like even while he has no idea everyone knows what he’s thinking. For example, no one wants to date a Transparent because they don’t want the intimate details of their love lives broadcast all over town, while the perfectly ordinary thoughts which should definitely stay in his head on catching sight of crush Megumi (Rina Uchiyama) can’t help but make her feel uncomfortable. The entire town is forced to pretend that they can’t hear him think, which seems somewhat unfair, leaving him at a disadvantage and more often at not at a loss as to why someone might seem hurt or upset by him when didn’t even say anything. Meanwhile, much of Yoko’s role lies in gently manipulating him, the entire committee decamping to a summer festival in a nearby town so they can let him down gently by leading him to believe Megumi already has a steady boyfriend who is kind to children and the elderly so he’s forced to be happy for her that’s she’s found such a great guy and can give up on his romantic aspirations. 

The tone is in general admirably progressive in that it ultimately argues for a greater sense of acceptance for all minorities, but it’s difficult to square the positive message with the ways the Transparents are also being uncritically manipulated, forced to live a simulacrum of a life in an engineered small-town Japan which grateful to have them only for the massive subsidies they receive for local development in return for making sure the Transparents are kept in the dark about their condition so that the committee can exploit their genius as they plan to do with Kenichi after getting him to the research institution. Even so what they discover is that Kenichi knew what his genius was and only through letting him follow his dreams can they truly unlock it, while the committee is forced to reckon with the various ways they’ve dehumanised him, the chairman eventually referring to him as a person as opposed #7 as he’d always called him before. Somewhat contradictory and more than a little uncomfortable in its implications, Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius is presented as heartwarming drama and it does indeed warm the heart with this its messages of equality and acceptance not to mention the right to follow one’s dreams whatever they may be but never really reckons with its central thesis in which the authorities pat themselves on the back for being kind and doing the right thing while simultaneously exploiting those they claim to care for without their knowledge or consent. 

Postman (邮差, He Jianjun, 1995)

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“You young people ask too many questions,” an exasperated postmaster tells a young man trying to refuse a job transfer but somehow embodying an authoritarian voice of order in post-Tiananmen China. The statement is in many ways ironic not least of them being that Xiao Dou (Feng Yuanzheng) barely speaks at all and mounts only a passive resistance to his dissatisfying existence. A portrait of repression, alienation, despair and hopelessness He Jianjun’s epistolary drama Postman (邮差, Yóuchāi) casts its hero as little different from the pillar boxes he instals on behalf of a distant authority, a soulless conduit for the thoughts and feelings of others. 

Xiao Dou is only “promoted” to the role of postman after his predecessor, an elderly man, confesses that he had taken to reading the letters he was supposed to be delivering and is ominously put into the back of a police van. In any case, it’s not long before Xiao Dou starts doing the same thing himself, transgressively relishing in his life as an epistolary voyeur reading the correspondence between an unhappily married woman and her lover with salacious obsession. Objecting to the affair on moral grounds he rejects his role as a passive messenger to interfere in their lives and put to a stop to it though later finds himself visiting a sex worker whose letters to a doctor he had stolen, while otherwise withholding a letter from a young man to his father in which he informs him of his intention to take his own life. 

Ironically assigned to the “Happiness District”, Xiao Dou encounters only yearning and confusion which echo the sense of hopelessness and despair among post-Tiananmen youth which continues to flounder in the changing China of the mid-90s. Then again in this rural backwater not much seems to have changed in the past few decades. The post-office where Xiao Dou works is marked by the maddening rhythms of his colleague Yun Qing (Huang Jianxin) rapidly stamping letters individually by hand before handing them off to Xiao Dou to deliver. The relentless sound and motion seems to reflect her own sexual repression which she eventually relieves by seducing the shy Xiao Dou who then takes another step forward towards transcending himself in completely abandoning conventional morality and compassion for others. 

Hitherto, Xiao Dou had not shown much interest in women and is annoyed when his sister suggests introducing him to a girl from the factory. His first visit to the sex worker, more out of voyeuristic curiosity than desire, ended in failure, yet he remains obsessively invested in the melancholy love letters he collects on his rounds detailing the longing and unhappiness of those around him. Perhaps the most surprising is between a gay writer who has become a drug user and his lover who seems to have disappeared. The writer later dies, presumably of an overdose if one provoked by a broken heart and despair for his life, but the existence of homosexual relationships usually considered so problematic by the censor’s board is otherwise depicted without comment save the uncomfortable implication that is a symptom of the moral decline of contemporary society. In any case, Xiao Dou does not seem to object to it or to the drug taking in the same way he does the affair though he may just assume it will eventually take care of itself. 

Like the writer’s lover, however, disappearances become common place. We see someone approach the pillar box to post a letter but when Xiao Dou turns around they have disappeared almost as if they too were sucked inside. Later he will disappear behind a pillar box he has just fitted in a new part of town the mail did not previously reach while his sister watches him fade out of view from the window of a bus as it rounds a corner. Xiao Dou’s sister had been keen for him to marry because she wanted to get married herself but was reluctant to leave the home their parents left them and wary of Xiao Dou’s ability to get by on his own. Yet through his various transgressions, Xiao Dou in a sense comes of age and is able of overcome his own repression to embrace his otherwise taboo desires in defiance of conventional morality. 

Xiao Dou asks his colleague why it is that things that are so hard to say come out easier in letters, but she answers him that for her it’s the opposite. She prefers to talk and once wrote a letter to a friend only to find herself unable to post it while standing in front of the box ironically enough because she doubted that it would arrive safely. His sense of reticence reflects the enforced silence of life in post-Tiananmen China, men and women afraid to speak their minds and imparting their true souls only to a trusted confidant in a letter but discovering that not even that is safe from prying eyes or the oppressive judgement of an unseen authority. Xiao Dou may see himself as a kind of angel, a passive emissary working on behalf of a higher power, but in liberating himself from his own repression falls still further a product of an ongoing moral disintegration born of nihilistic despair. 

Push Pause (ココでのはなし, Ryoma Kosasa, 2023)

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A small hotel becomes a refuge for those “struggling with the everyday” according to live-in helper Utako in Ryoma Kosasa’s heartwarming drama, Push Pause (ココでのはなし, Kokoro de no Hanashi). As she said, most of their customers are there because they’re uncertain of something and looking to take take some time out for reflection, much as she is while otherwise taking advantage of the tranquil and unjudgemental space of the inn along with the comfort it offers.

Guest House Coco is however suffering too amid the post-pandemic decline in custom. Th owner Hirofumi, attempts to sell his bike to pick up some extra cash only to discover it worth much less than he thought. The first of their guests, Tamotsu, is struggling for similar reasons seeing as the owner of the batting cages where he works is considering closing down as customers continue to stay away leaving him floundering for new direction. Helping an old friend move brings him into contact with someone he worked with for the Paralympics, but it only seems to fuel his sense of insecurity reflecting that unlike his friend he has no talents or ambitions and isn’t sure he wants to return to work for with him because it only makes him feel bad.

For Xiaolu, meanwhile, she’s dealing with issues as of a different order while house hunting in Tokyo ahead of a job transfer. Though her colleague had agreed to help her, he suddenly tells her he’d rather she didn’t come mostly it seems because he’s afraid she’ll expose him as an otaku thanks to their shared love of anime and people in the office will make fun of him. But then he also drops in that most of his colleagues are subtly racist, even insensitively adding that Xiaolu doesn’t “look Chinese” on first glance especially as her Japanese is so good unwittingly exposing his own latent prejudice. Her parents in China keep calling her to come home especially as her grandmother is in poor health leaving Xiaolu feeling guilty and now slightly unwanted unsure if it’s a good idea to accept the transfer or even remain in Japan at all.

Even Izumi, a permanet resident of the guest house, accidentally hurts her feelings in innocently asking if she’s from China on hearing her name though as it turns out Izumi was herself born in Manchuria and apparently a war orphan though in truth she seems nowhere near old enough to have been born in the 1940s. In any case, Izumi is the beating heart of Coco providing the warm and homely environment that sets people at their ease and makes them feel welcome and accepted. As she tells Xiaolu, fate has a way of bringing people together or at least getting them where they need to be so they can make an informed choice about their futures.

That’s why she echoes the title of the film in giving some advice to the young from a position of age in telling them that it’s alright to slow down, take a few moments to think things through rather than feeling as if they need to charge ahead. According to her, youth is just a part of your life that doesn’t even last very long so there’s no need to rush through it which seems like valuable advice to near middle-aged inn owner Hirofumi who is considering proposing to his girlfriend but is uncertain because she has children already and he isn’t sure they’ll accept him. Utako too has her own problems she’s in part been hiding from in leaving her home town to hole up in the inn. 

As if bearing out the sense of community that arises at there, Utako reveals that they stay in contact with their guests giving them the sense of a secure place to return to where they’ll always be accepted and cared for. Thanks to the support of the others at the Coco, each of them begin to find new directions in their lives and are able to proceed with more confidence and certainty. Warmhearted and empathetic Kosasa’s gentle drama is and ode to the quiet solidarity and unexpected connections that arise between people each struggling with the everyday but finding new strength in each other.

Female Slave Ship (女奴隷船, Yoshiki Onoda, 1960)

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Playing out much more like a classic serial than war movie, Yoshiki Onoda’s Female Slave Ship (女奴隷船Onna dorei-sen) takes a curiously flippant approach to the conflict along with a moral perhaps a little at odds with similar films of the time. Adapted from a novel by Jun Funazaki, the film begins as spy thriller but ends up drifting into pirate territory as a Japanese solider with an incredibly important mission is shot down on his way to Tokyo, rescued by a freighter carrying women en route to being sex trafficked in Shanghai, and then captured by pirates who want to sell him to a Chinese spy working for the Americans. 

It’s right at the end of the war and Japan is losing quite badly they think because of advancements made in radar by the Allied forces. They’ve been passed blueprints for a better radar system by a German contact and so Lt. Sugawa (Bunta Sugawara), stationed in Malaya, has been charged with bringing them back to Tokyo disguised as a photo of a pretty young woman they’re going to say is his sister. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the film is that Sugawa abandons his mission quite quickly and instead devotes himself to rescuing the women, vowing not to return to Tokyo without them despite the fact that this vital information he’s carrying could supposedly turn the tide of the war.

Even so, this manly chivalry defines his code of heroism. He is constantly trying to escape and defiantly stands up both to the captain of the tugboat, who is not actually in charge, but also to the pirate captain (Tetsuro Tanba) who doesn’t really seem to be doing much of anything. Among the crew of pirates is a Japanese man who later confirms that he’s a deserter but alternately switches sides, first offering to team up with Sugawa because he’s fed up with the discrimination he faces from the other pirates, and then betraying him before doing the same thing again but claiming that he feels bad about deserting and wants to do something for Japan now that his Japaneseness has been truly awoken.

It was indeed other Japanese people who were operating the slave ship, chief of them being the Queen (Yoko Mihara) who rules the boat with an iron hand but then uses her sex appeal to curry favour with the pirate captain while simultaneously developing feelings for Sugawa who is equally drawn to a meek young woman, Rumi (Utako Mitsuya), who was tricked onto the boat on the promise of a nursing job in Manchuria. Most of the other women, few of whom are actually given any characterisation, are established sex workers and resolved to their fates but all feel bad for and protective of Rumi. Though she’s the one Sugawa is closest to, it’s quite refreshing that the women are otherwise treated as equals rather than looked down on because of their occupation with Sugawa insistent on rescuing them all before they can be sold in Shanghai. 

As is usual for these kinds of films, the chief villain is Chin (Shuji Kawabe), a Chinese man apparently with ties to the Americans who has somehow found out about the radar plans, even knowing that they’re presented on a photo of a woman, and wants to capture Sugawa to get his hands on them. The bounty causes a rift between the pirate captain and Chin with the pirate captain wanting in on the deal and Chin not really willing to share, though there is a clear implication that these mercenary pirates are on the wrong the side in working with the Chinese and Americans while the slave ship was more on the level of not being okay but definitely not as bad. 

In any case, it comes down to a battle of masculinity between the monkey-loving pirate captain and his trusty whip, and Sugawa’s good old-fashioned chivalry. Surprisingly chaste given its racy title, even the pirates are more of the drunken and lascivious type than violent and rapacious, the film has a rather odd sensibility landing somewhere between jungle adventure and wartime escapade in which an earnest young man bravely carries the weight of the nation on his shoulders while doing his best to address a more immediate threat and rescue 12 captive women from the evils of Japan’s imperialist expansion. 

Original trailer (no subtitiles)

The 8th Night (제8일의 밤, Kim Tae-hyoung, 2021)

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“But even the most trivial moments of our predetermined fate are meaningful as pieces of the whole” according to embittered former monk Jin-su having reached a moment of philosophical epiphany after bringing his karmic retribution full circle. Another in the recent series of Buddhist supernatural thrillers from Korea, Kim Tae-hyoung’s The 8th Night (제8일의 밤, Je8ileui Bam) once again turns apocalyptic as an ancient evil is set for accidental revival thanks, largely, to the wounded pride of a bitter old man. 

As the opening voice over explains, thousands of years ago the world was threatened by a powerful demon. Luckily, Buddha managed to vanquish him, tearing out his two eyes, one black one red, and burying them on opposite sides of the Earth in order to prevent them ever being reunited. Some people, however, just can’t resist chaos which is presumably why Professor Kim (Park Hae-joon) insists on retrieving the canister containing the Red Eye from its desert resting place, thereafter releasing its power when his discovery is rejected by both Buddhist and scholarly authorities. Sensing a disturbance in the equilibrium of the world along with the upcoming Blood Moon, priest Hajeong (Lee Eol) realises the prophecy of which he has been a guardian is about to come true. His big, somewhat unethical plan, is to kill off one of the seven pre-ordained victims of the Red Eye which he plans to possess in order to reunite with its partner in and stop it body hopping towards the apocalypse. 

You can make a case for greater good, but murdering an innocent person to put an end to a curse seems at best unfair, not to mention not very Buddhist. Hajeong sends young monk Cheong-Seok (Nam Da-reum) to track down his former pupil, Jin-su (Lee Sung-min) then known as Seonhwa to give him the instruction to assassinate the “Virgin Shaman” with a holy axe to stop Red Eye in its tracks. Jin-su is seemingly unconflicted about the murder but is carrying his own baggage, now living as a resentful construction worker. As it turns out, he and Cheong-seok are also linked by a karmic circle of guilt and trauma that the boy doesn’t remember and Jin-su has been running away from since leaving the temple. Meanwhile, he is also plagued by voices of departed spirits he for some reason refuses to help cross over to the other side. 

Meanwhile, over on the side of the rational, two policemen mirror the monks’ movements as they investigate the strange paper chain of mummified corpses turning up all over the city. Veteran cop Ho-tae (Park Hae-joon) feels responsible for his feckless associate Dong-jin, blaming himself for an accident which has left him physically impaired while resisting instructions from his boss to fire him. Yet the pair are entirely ill equipped to investigate this case of spiritual malevolence, confused by its religious connotations but perhaps filled with suspicion on realising that all of the victims belong to the same “meditation group” for people with suicidal thoughts which has been offering “free” blood tests and apparently paying for attendance. Described by one as more like a cult, the shady meditation group might be one kind of evil but what they’re currently facing is on an entirely different level. 

The irony is that it’s Jin-su who must learn to save the world by finding closure with his own traumatic past, generating a paternal bond with young monk Cheong-seok who is so excited by the world beyond the temple that he accidentally breaks his vow of silence and then can’t stop talking. Cheong-seok’s sense of wonder and confusion, unsure what to do about the meat he keeps finding in his food but also slightly bemused by Jin-su’s willingness to eat it for him, stands in direct contrast to Jin-su’s embittered cynicism as he attempts to resist his destiny only to receive a ghostly reminder that you can’t escape your fate and, in any case, his duty would simply fall on the successor, Cheong-seok. In order to save the world, he has to free not only himself but also Cheong-seok too from the cycle of karmic retribution which binds each of them in the “agony and anxiety” of the monster’s separated eyes, determining to set them to rest once again to restore a sense of balance in a destabilising world. A buddhist procedural, Kim’s supernatural horror may rediscover that hell is a place on Earth but eventually allows its heroes the possibility of escape if only in the willingness to free themselves from the shackles of the traumatic past. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Missing (Iti Mapukpukaw, Carl Joseph E. Papa, 2023)

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The title of Carl Joseph E. Papa’s meta animation The Missing (Iti Mapukpukaw) most obviously refers to the hero’s uncle with whom his mother has lost contact, but in a deeper sense refers to the protagonist himself and the various things he too is missing which notably includes his mouth. Shot in a rotoscope style, Eric’s (Carlo Aquino) mouth is literally blurred out as if it had been erased and smoothed over. He can no longer speak but uses a dry erase board to communicate with those around him.

His troubles start just he’s about to go on a sort of date with coworker Carlo (Gio Gahol) which ends with them discovering the body of his uncle who has apparently passed away in a lonely death. It’s it at this point that Eric is plagued by an alien who keeps trying to abduct him claiming that they have unfinished business. Eric later asserts that he’s afraid the alien is trying to take over his body, hinting at a deeper childhood trauma and anxiety over bodily autonomy and intimacy. The alien’s attacks seem intensify as he grows closer to Carlo, frustrating their tentative romance as if it actively trying to obstruct it. 

The alien’s presence leads to what may seem to others like strange or inconsiderate behaviour. He disappears on Carlo, locks him out of his flat, and seemingly drops out of contact for days on end causing him not an inconsiderate degree of worry given he’s just lost his uncle and appears to be in a state of emotional distress. Yet the most surprising thing is even on being told about the alien Carlo decides to just go with it, taking Eric’s explanation at face value and trying to help him evade it for as long as possible. He eventually admits that he can’t see what Eric sees and they aren’t where he thinks they are but otherwise provides a safe and non-judgmental presence that quietly supports him while he battles his internal demons. His mother Linda (Dolly De Leon) does something similar apparently aware of the alien’s existence, but not what lies behind it or what it really might mean.

Just as reality and fantasy begin to blur for Eric, Papa uses the medium to express his mental state as the world seems to literally crumble around him. The alien steals parts of his body and they literally disappear, a missing ear and blurred out eye along with a blankness where his hand should be. When Eric begins to recall his childhood memories, the animation style switches from the sophisticated rotoscoping of the rest of the film to something much simpler echoing a child’s drawings. In these sequences, the face of Eric’s uncle is always scribbled over in black pen echoing his more literal refusal to see and accept the past. He has been literally silenced by his trauma but now finds it banging on the doors of his mind demanding to be let in.

Yet the reason he is able to overcome it is precisely because of the love an acceptance he receives from his mother and Carlo who never question his reality or attempt to break him out of it, instead deciding to join him there and help him in his quest to get rid of the alien that has plagued him since his childhood. Only this way can he begin to reclaim the parts of himself that were missing, digging through the buried past to retrieve what was taken from him and eventually recovering his voice. 

His quest has a gently absurd quality as parts of him suddenly detach themselves and run away, leaving it unclear for much of the film if Eric’s alien is “real” in a more concrete sense or merely a representation of his childhood trauma and very much inspired by logics and aesthetics of a small child who has been forced to keep a secret out of fear and shame and thereby unable to communicate his pain. In the end it’s love that brings him out of it, a gentle, patient and unconditional love that takes him as he is and gives him the space to find his own way out his trauma. Filled with a sense of warmth despite the darkness of its centre Carl Joseph E. Papa’s strangely poignant film for all its talk of aliens and destruction is remarkably human allowing its protagonist to finally begins to recover himself thanks to the loving support of those around him.

The Missing screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Volunteering for Villainy (悪人志願, Tsutomu Tamura, 1960)

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Tamotsu Tamura is best known as a screenwriter who worked closely with Nagisa Oshima, though he did actually direct a film himself at the beginning of his career. Having originally planned to become a reporter, Tamura was offered a job at Sankei Shimbun but his employment was postponed for medical reasons and he decided to retake the entrance exam for Shochiku joining the studio in 1955. Unfortunately Volunteering for Villainy (悪人志願, Akunin Shigan, AKA The Samurai Vagabonds) was not successful at the box office and Tamura soon left Shochiku along with Oshima and became a screenwriter at his independent production company. 

In any case, the film is very reminiscent of New Wave filmmaking both in terms of theme and aesthetic. It repurposes a moribund quarry town as an almost literal purgatorial space casting the protagonists into a deep hole from which they are eternally unable to escape. As the film opens, a collection of children are taunting a young woman, Hide (Kayoko Hono), calling her a murderer and castigating her for failing to die, though it later transpires that they’ve been hired by a henchmen of Tatsuo (Masahiko Tsugawa), the brother of the man she was involved in double suicide with who is determined to become some kind of local dictator.

But even he is in some ways rebelling against his powerlessness as the son of a local politician he brands as phoney and corrupt. Tatsuo claims he hates people who claim to be good but aren’t, in much the same way as Hide claims she can no longer trust anyone. Tatsuo seems to want revenge for the death of his brother for which he holds Hide responsible but insists he doesn’t want to settle it with money nor is he in favour when a shady local man makes vague allusions to having her bumped off.

When a new recruit, Yasuo (Fumio Watanabe), joins the quarry he becomes its latest kicking bag not least because it was Hide who escorted him into town. Yasuo has a stammer and incredibly meek manner that leans towards obsequiousness. “You’re as obedient as a dog,” people often remark with Tatsuo later astutely observing that he’s the sort of person who can’t do anything without someone telling him to do it. Yet it later seems as if his desire to obey, to be liked and accepted by those around him, has led him to commit a terrible crime claiming that he only did what everybody wanted done even if they were too afraid to say so.

Ashamed of himself and his corrupted masculinity Yasuo alternately rebels and overcompensates. He refuses to hit Hide when ordered to by Tatsuo, and to sleep with her when forced by the other men, but later hits and sleeps with her possibly not quite consensually when his masculinity is challenged. The irony is that Tatsuo who claimed he wouldn’t tolerate anyone defying him cannot control Hide’s free spirit and is therefore unable to overcome his powerlessness. He bullies and harasses her insisting that she leave town, but Hide refuses to go and is continually unbothered by the way she’s treated. Hide also eventually rejects Yasuo for his cowardice, severing her ties to him on realising that he informed on one of the other men who was fugitive from justice to curry favour with Tatsuo and take the heat off himself. She tells Tatsuo that though he’s always wanted things his own way, she’s always decided for herself, infuriating him with her free decision to leave having realised how petty and meaningless it was to stay in this petty and meaningless purgatory of broken and hopeless men. 

Tamura shoots with a roving and curious camera that takes on a life of its own swooping through the dorms but lends a degree of mythic eeriness to the final confrontation in the quarry as the workers begin to dot the skyline looking down at Hide below in a scene somehow reminiscent of L’Avventura. The town’s only bright spot is presented by Tatsuo’s younger sister Kiyoko (Chiaki Tsukioka) as the voice of reason even as she  brands everything boring and meaningless but thereby suggesting that it might not have to be this way. Her words, however, fall on largely deaf ears save those of Hide perhaps finally awake to her own agency only to have it immediately crushed by fragile masculinity.

City of Wind (Сэр сэр салхи, Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir, 2023)

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Part way through Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir’s Mongolian drama City of Wind (Сэр сэр салхи), a young woman asks the hero if he’s ever felt as if he were split in two and there’s a part of him sitting somewhere else vaguely unfulfilled. It’s a feeling he might know all too well as he finds himself torn between the traditionalism of his upbringing and the pull towards the shiny consumerism of the modern city even as his school friend chuckles that he can’t wait to leave the country altogether.

The juxtaposition is evident even in the opening sequence as a figure in a shamanistic outfit referred to by others as “Grandpa Spirit” attempts to reassure an elderly man who fears that his time is near and that his son isn’t ready. The figure speaks with the ominously deep voice of an ancient deity while a young woman translates back and fore between a more archaic dialect and modern Mongolian though when the figure removes its headress the face the behind the mask is that of a teenage boy far too young to offer such rich life advice.

Now 17 and about to leave high school, Ze (Tergel Bold-Erdene) is a top student only mocked a little by his classmates over his shamanistic side hustle while clearly a favourite of their ridiculously pompous teacher who is convinced he is a future saviour Mongolia. But despite the traditionalism of his homelife, Ze dreams of living in a fancy appartment in the city and frequently takes trips to wander around the shopping mall gazing at items he could never afford as if infected with an unstoppable consumerist virus. 

The irony is that the girl he fancies wants exactly what he has, a peaceful life in the country and the security of a family home her parents having spilt up and her father living abroad in Korea. He first meets Maralaa (Nomin-Erdene Ariunbyamba) when her mother hires him to do a blessing before she has a risky heart operation. She brands him a conman and he’s hooked. Nevertheless, the more he associates with her the further he travels from steadiness of his spiritual practice. She dyes his hair which raises eyebrows at school and at home, and takes him to nightclubs in the city where the strobe lighting seems to cause him an existential confusion as if parts of himself were blinking in and out. He leaves abruptly and explains that he doesn’t think he should be there, it seems to have upset his spirit.

Little by little be begins to rebel, acting up at school and tempted away from his home but seems genuinely worried by the prospect that his spirit may really have abandoned him and that in crossing a line in his relationship with Maralaa he may have unwittingly made a choice that can’t be reversed. Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir deftly scans the changing nature of Mongolian society in panning over the somewhat rundown area in which Ze lives where yurts are mingled with more modern-looking bungalows and neighbours are treated as members of an extended family. A Soviet-era mural peers down at Maralaa and Ze as they overlook the city with its myriad high rise buildings and discuss their ironically contrasting dreams for past and future respectively.

Ze’s teacher views him as a future CEO who will one day save Mongolia through his economic acumen, though it seems like he may end up rebuilding the nation in a different, perhaps more literal way. Despite his adventures in modernity he comes to understand the value of his gift which lies in his ability to provide comfort to those around him along with a sense of continuity and spirituality that anchors them in their ever changing world. Suburban setting aside, Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir captures a sense of beauty and serenity in the landscape through the snowcapped vistas that lie in front of Ze in the midst of his confusion as a young man torn in two, one looking toward the future with an irrepressible yearning, and the other towards the warmth and reassurance of the past while perhaps like his nation still floundering for balance and direction but always supported by the gentle love of those around him content to let him find his own way back to wherever it is he’s supposed to be.

City of Wind screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Not Friends (เพื่อน (ไม่) สนิท, Atta Hemwadee, 2023)

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There’s a gentle sense of loss that runs through Atta Hemwadee’s quirky Thai dramedy Not Friends (เพื่อน (ไม่) สนิท), not only for those who are now absent and exist only in our memories but for missed opportunities and things left unsaid. Then again, its hero, Pae (Anthony Buisseret), takes a while to warm up to the benefits of friendship, like many teenage boys resentful and alienated, unable to accept the hand extended to him by his infinitely cheerful new deskmate, Joe (Pisitpol Ekaphongpisit), who walks around with a beatific smile permanently plastered across his face. 

Before he can make amends, however, Joe is hit by a car after returning from a school trip sending the school into a period of shocked mourning that for some reason includes a talent contest. After hearing of a competition that offers entrance to film school as a prize, Pae decides to enter and to make his late “best friend” Joe the focus of the film only to immediately be caught out in his duplicity by Joe’s former best friend Bokeh (Thitiya Jirapornsilp) who resents his intention to exploit Joe’s death for his own ends. 

It has to be said, that Pae does not come out of this well though his predicament does highlight a social stigma towards working class boys in his intense desire to escape having to take over his dad’s flour mill having been teased by his former classmates about his “stinky shirt” because he has to air dry his clothes in an area adjacent to the factory. A similar sense of lonely alienation is found in a short story Joe had submitted to a story contest which is about a boy who feels hopelessly ordinary and looks up to the stars thinking about all the other versions of himself on other planets who are “special”, top athletes or super spies or dim but loved by those around him. The boy wants his other selves to see him and know that he is special too, but seems not to feel it himself. 

Coming late to the idea, Pae slowly realises that Joe is special because “Joe is our friend” though he’d mostly ignored his attempts at friendship while he was alive. In any case, he doesn’t really notice the friendships he’s making with Bokeh or the others working on the film either but remains focussed on his own goal of winning the contest and escaping the flour mill. In the end the film he’s making ends up becoming less about Joe himself and more of an ode to absent friends, something echoed in Bokeh’s valedictory speech in which she bids goodbye to her “best not friends” and hopes that though they may not meet, they’ll miss each other every now and then. 

It comes down to a question of what friendship really is and whether Pae can be persuaded to abandon his sense of self interest to defend it. He realises that Joe had a lot of dreams too, ones he never got to fulfil and a couple that could be fulfilled for him if not in reality than in fantasy imagining how their lives might have turned out if Pae had been less self-involved and Joe had lived. Still, on finding out something unexpected he’s forced to confront the idea that perhaps you don’t really know anyone. Everyone knows a slightly different version of the same person but friendship is really about shared intimacy and a willingness to be open and vulnerable while simultaneously respecting the boundaries of others.

To that extent it really is about the friends we make along the way. Pae slowly comes to realise that he’s accidentally become friends with the crew on the film and lets go of some of his resentment becoming less self-centred and more willing to interact with others even warming to his father and family business he’d previously been ashamed of while also gaining the courage to pursue his dream of a career in film. Cineliterate, Atta Hemwadee breaks the action with a filmmaking rap and makes frequent references to popular film but invests the high school movie with a wistful sense of loss and nostalgia for the absent friends of youth whom we miss once in a while but are in another sense always with us. 

 Not Friends screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)