Greenhouse (비닐하우스, Lee Sol-hui, 2022)

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A middle-aged woman makes a series of questionable choices while pursuing her dream of a stable home with her teenage son in Lee Sol-hui’s downbeat tale of life on the margins of contemporary Korea, Greenhouse (비닐하우스). The Korean title of “Vinyl House” might be a little more accurate, in that the heroine lives in a disused polytunnel on an allotment her son later says the family used to go to every weekend before his parents’ divorce while eagerly waiting for his return after which she hopes to start again.

The son, however, first says that he has no desire to live with her and intends to stay with an uncle after leaving juvenile detention. The film never directly states what led him there, but he later mentions he and some friends all seemingly released at the same time used to break into houses owing to having “nowhere to drink.” One of his chief objections seems to be his mother’s lack of a more traditional home and the embarrassment it causes him with his delinquent friends which is one reason why Moon-jung (Kim Seo-hyung) is desperately saving her money for a deposit on a modern flat and a life of comfort she can otherwise only dream of. She has a job as a housekeeper for a wealthy older couple, the wife has dementia and is paranoid Moon-jung is trying to kill her, and the husband has all but completely lost his sight, but faces the implosion of her dreams with the announcement that they are considering moving into a nursing home.

In a repeated motif, Moon-jung often violently slaps herself on the side of the head in an apparent act of self-harm. Explaining that she used to see a psychiatrist but can no longer afford it, she joins a support group for people in a similar position and encounters a vulnerable young woman, Soo-nam (Ahn Ji-hye), with whom she later develops a sisterly connection after realising that she may be trapped in an abusive relationship she is unable to escape because of her learning difficulties. 

They are each in their way pushed out of mainstream society by virtue of their age, poverty, or disability and largely reliant on the kindness of strangers that rarely comes their way. The film only ever hints at the hard life Moon-jung may have lived but suggests that her past trauma may help to explain some of her otherwise incomprehensible decisions after the old lady hits her head and presumably dies in a domestic accident. While she cares for a wealthy older couple who remain independent in their own home, Moon-jung’s mother lives a miserable life in an inexpensive nursing home. A woman visiting her roommate soothes and strokes her mother encouraging her to keep on living as long as possible even if it’s “like this” while Moon-jung seems to have mixed emotions, on one level guilty not to be able to care for her mother herself and perhaps wanting to be relieved of any responsibility towards her. 

In some ways, Moon-jung’s tragedy may be that she is at heart just an ordinary, decent person and is torn between a genuine desire to help and care for others and a cynicism that tells her she is foolish for doing so. She wants to help Soon-nam perhaps identifying with her suffering, but is also resentful of her sudden attempt to latch on to her and fearful her presence may disrupt the new life she dreams of with her son which is the only ray of hope in an otherwise miserable existence. When that dream is threatened she decides to anything she can to save it even if it seems obvious that her series of bad decisions will not pay off because her subterfuge will quickly be exposed. 

What she doesn’t bank on is the sheer magnitude of cosmic ironies the film throws at her in which every avenue of her life is somehow undermined by another from her relationship with the elderly couple to her friendship with Soon-nam, and a romance with a man who may have been in someway abusive. Exploring the hopelessness experienced by an abandoned generation whose children have mostly moved abroad and outsourced their care, the plight of women like Moon-jung trying to do their best but frustrated by extreme bad luck, and vulnerable young people like Soon-nam who has no one to defend her as an orphan with learning difficulties, the film may suggest that they are each trapped in the hothouse of the modern society baked alive by hopelessness and indifference while struggling to find a place for themselves in an increasingly unforgiving city. 

Greenhouse screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Korean subtitles only)

The Cold-Blooded Trap (冷血の罠, Takahisa Zeze, 1998)

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“This place is full of people like me” a violent criminal jeers, admitting that he’s killed “plenty” of women but not necessarily the one he’s being questioned about. There is indeed something eerie that seems to have taken over this small corner of Shibuya in Takahisa Zeze’s dark millennial thriller The Cold-Blooded Trap (冷血の罠, Reiketsu no Wana). “Strange things are happening here” another investigator notes, “someone’s malice has infected this whole place.” Yet the sense of haunting may be closer to home than it first seems as two men attempt to come to terms with a traumatic past by solving present mystery. 

Even the police seem to concede that the strange goings on are a “continuation” of something else. As we first meet him private detective Fujiwara (Sho Aikawa) appears to be following a young woman home from the station only as we later discover she hired him herself to watch over her because she had the feeling she was being watched. Fujiwara watches her enter her apartment building and then calls her to say everything looks clear on the ground, but a short time later a body wrapped in sheets is dropped from the roof onto the street below. The weird thing is that it’s the same building Fujiwara’s sister Noriko used to live in, only she took her own life and that of her child by jumping off the roof five years previously. 

Not only does Fujiwara feel as if he failed in his duty to protect his client, but he’s forced into a similar contemplation in his latent guilt surrounding his sister’s death. The most obvious reason for Noriko to have considered suicide was that her salaryman husband Hanazono (Hidetoshi Nishijima) had been having an affair with a work colleague, Yoko (Asuka Kurosawa), yet Hanazono refuses to accept responsibility and is convinced that Noriko was murdered by a mysterious serial killer stalking the streets of Shibuya. 

The irony is that we first think Hanazono is the faceless killer after watching him enter the woman’s apartment building, only to learn that he may have been investigating Noriko’s death. Later these assumptions are overturned again, but even he concedes that he seems suspicious. Wandering around the city at night, he runs into women alone who immediately see him as a threat and assume he may be a dangerous criminal who means them harm. The realisation first shocks him, but then gives way to a physical high in the adrenaline rush of fleeing the scene. He comes to the conclusion that he must get into the killer’s mindset in order to catch him and begins actively stalking people around the city, following them home and checking mailboxes to find out names. 

Fujiwara doesn’t trust Hanazono for obvious and understandable reasons, but even so he begins following him as Hanazono continues to follow the killer. Zeze opens the film with fuzzy 90s camcorder footage trained on the forecourt of a station from a balcony opposite. The camera follows a woman as she leaves, and Fujiwara behind her with eerie intent evoking the mild paranoia of millennial surveillance. Later Hanazono films his own POV walking through the midnight city, once again lending the streets a sense of lurking malevolence and dread-fuelled fatalism even before he arrives at his shocking destination. 

Yet we wonder if Hanazono is just a paranoid obsessive with his giant map of crime insisting that seemingly isolated incidents of violence are somehow linked. Before Fujiwara hears about the woman’s death on the news they were reporting on insolvent banks hinting at a financial anxiety in the contemporary society, and as the suspect Fujiwara later tracks down suggests there are lot of distressed or perhaps disturbed people around. The crimes may really be random, but they are also connected by virtue of being provoked by an anxious society even if as Hanazono admits there are several criminals behind them. Whether or not he gets the answer he seeks, Fujiwara will have to accept that he too bears some responsibility as Hanazono has perhaps already done even if desperate to deny it. “I’ve always been responsible” he admits while taking control over his life, only the elliptical structure of the film may imply otherwise. Dark and eerie, Zeze captures a sense of millennial dread in the streets of the capital filled as they are with “random” crimes and lurking killers in the haunting anxiety of constant threat.

Clip (English subtitles)

Hand (手, Daigo Matsui, 2022)

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A young woman unwittingly meditates on emotional distance and the impossibility of intimacy while fixating on older men in an attempt to overcome her loneliness in feeling rejected by her father in Daigo Matsui’s contemporary Roman Porno, Hand (手, Te). Partly a critique of a misogynistic society, the film is as much interested in why old men like young girls as it is why Sawako (Akari Fukunaga) likes old men along with her general disdain for the various roles she’s expected to play. 

Sawako largely describes these as “life skills”, a brief flashback to the 20-year-old her wondering why weird old men suddenly took an interest in her when she left high school. The old guys make inappropriate banter with the woman behind bar that shocks Sawako in its crassness and leaves her wondering if she’ll be expected to “eco-exist” with men like these for the rest of her life. She decides if that’s the way it is she’ll need to equip herself which at 25 mainly involves adopting an ultra feminine persona, pretending to be stupid laughing at men’s rubbish jokes and giggling sweetly at every opportunity. Co-worker Mori (Daichi Kaneko) has, however, seen through her act especially as she doesn’t bother to put it on for him and is rather frank in her cynicism which gives her an air of authenticity that might in other ways be misleading. 

Meanwhile, she spends her time taking photos of middle-aged men and putting them in her scrapbook while sometimes going on “dates” with older guys. What soon becomes apparent is that she resents her family, with whom she still lives, and feels a little pushed out as if no one really cared about her only her younger sister Rika who in stark contrast to her is cheerful and outgoing. When she offers to make her father dinner, he doesn’t respond but apparently does when her sister asks. Sawako feels like her father thinks of her as “dark and boring” and assumes that he ignores her deliberately because he has no interest in her yet she ironically also ignores him, refusing her mother’s request that she accompany him to a hospital appointment petulantly suggesting he’d probably prefer it if Rika went. The truth is that they simply don’t know how to talk to each other, sitting far apart at the back of a bus like a couple that’s had an argument. 

A more age appropriate relationship with co-worker Mori seems as if it’s breaking down some barriers towards intimacy but finally leaves her additionally vulnerable as he too turns out to be a fairly weak, emotionally dishonest man despite his outward consideration for her. In contrast with the older men, his courtship had been coy, shyly asking to hold her hand and for permission before he kissed her while otherwise leaving her to take the lead though in the end he may not have been much different. One of the older gentlemen ironically describes her as “insecure” yet misreads her insecurity as sexual rather than emotional only for her to let the mask slip and bite back, frankly telling him that it can be “rude” to treat a woman like a girl and that his dismissiveness is offensive. If all he sees in her is “youth” then he should just date a naive teenager instead.

“Youth” may be the answer to her question about why old men like young women, something confirmed by her date’s sighing that he finds dating her “nostalgic” as if he were young again too. But what she was looking for was warmth, the closing of an emotional gap of the kind that Mori proposed when he asked to hold her hand but never really followed through on. Then again, as another said she does indeed have a habit of running away, rolling her eyes at the idea of seriousness in an attempt to mask her fear of intimacy and treating everything as a cynical joke to avoid facing reality. “Whatever you do you have to engage with people” her similarly reticent father tells while beginning to break the ice, slowly closing the gap in extending a hand across it that provokes an emotional breakthrough. Quietly poignant in the slow motion of its heroine’s gradual liberation, Matsui’s otherwise biting take on contemporary patriarchy and follies of old men nevertheless allows her to reclaim herself in opening up to others.

Hand screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Deep Sea (深海, Tian Xiaopeng, 2023) [Fantasia 2023]

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“For you who passed through the darkness” runs a dedicatory title card at the conclusion of Tian Xiaopeng’s stunning animated drama, Deep Sea (深海, Shēn Hǎi). Aimed squarely at younger audiences, the film is an exploration of depression and despair as the young heroine is plunged into a dark sea feeling that her life has no value but there encounters a fantastical world of colour and light while chasing the ghost of the mother who abandoned her.

As if to signify her loneliness, the film opens in a blizzard in which Shenxiu (Wang Tingwen) desperately searches for her mother only for her shadow to turn into a strange, many eyed monster. Back in the “real” world, she’s off on a family holiday with her father, his new wife, and their baby son, the family of three sitting in front while she remains behind on her own wearing the red hoodie that once belonged to her mother. About to get on a boat for a six-day cruise, she drafts a message to her mother about how excited she is to see the ocean but then scrolls back up and remembers all the times her mother didn’t reply and the times she did to tell her she’s busy and wishes Shenxiu wouldn’t contact her if it isn’t urgent. She deletes the message and rejoins her family but they’re so busy fussing over the baby that they don’t have time for her either and in fact seem to have forgotten that today is her birthday.

Venturing out on the deck in a storm, Shenxiu is sucked into a tornado in which she sees the outline of her mother and meets a strange sea creature, Hijinx, from a story her mother had told her believing that it has come to guide her to where her mother is living. Before too long she arrives at a bizarre floating restaurant where aquatic creatures go to eat run by “avant-garde” chef Nanhe (Su Xin). In some ways, Nanhe comes to represent her mother in that he first rejects her, insisting that she’s bad luck and kicking her out but later takes her back and tries to make her happy in an effort to stave off the “Red Phantom” that threatens to consume her, taking on the form of her mother’s red hoodie in which she attempts to bury herself as a symbol of her loneliness and despair. 

Beautifully animated, the world of the restaurant is a silkpunk paradise of chaotic action, part pirate ship and part fantastical submarine powered by walruses on stationery bicycles. Tian Xiaopeng makes fantastic use of the projector screen to illuminate Shenxiu’s fantasies, neatly including a cartoon within the cartoon in a more traditional 2D style while otherwise reflecting Nanhe’s broken dreams for a homeland he says he can never return to. Shenxiu too shifts between alternate “realities”, experiencing brief flashbacks to happy memories of her mother and others of less happy times as she’s sent for counselling by a school concerned she seems withdrawn only to be told the solution is to smile more so she’ll fit in better encouraging her to bury herself and her feelings under an affected facade of cheerfulness for the comfort of others.  

Nanhe’s final acceptance of her comes when he tells he that he hopes all her future smiles will be from the heart unlike the clown face he sometimes wears with its eerie, false grin intended to ward off other people’s discomfort but largely masking pain in himself. He also tells her that though the “real” world may seem grey and miserable in comparison to the dazzling colour of her dreams, there will bright moments waiting for her that no matter how small are worth living for. It might seem a heavy message to deliver to small children, but also one that some may sadly need to hear. Tian opts for a more realistic conclusion than many might expect in which Shenxiu but nevertheless allows her to punch through her loneliness and despair into a happier existence bonding with her stepmother and seemingly better integrated into her family no longer feeling excluded or alone. Absolutely breathtaking in its execution, Tian’s incredibly rich fantasy world is a riot of whimsy but also tempered by a deep empathy and compassion for anyone who’s battled their way through a dark sea. 

Deep Sea screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Amiko Wins Obayashi Prize at 2023 JAPAN CUTS

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Japan Society New York has announced the winner of this year’s JAPAN CUTS Obayashi Prize which was introduced in 2020 in memory of the late director Nobuhiko Obayashi and is awarded to an independently produced narrative feature from an emerging filmmaker in the festival’s sole competitive category, Next Generation. This year’s jury which included critic and essayist Moeko Fujii, Film at Lincoln Center programmer Dan Sullivan, and distributor Pearl Chan (Good Move Media, Kani Releasing), has selected Yusuke Morii’s Amiko offering the following statement:

“As Amiko peeks into calligraphy class watching other children practice discipline and character building, they play a game of who can spot her first. She is too much, too loud; she cannot be held inside the lines and there is no language to describe her. This is where the vivid auditory and visual world of the film rushes in to sketch the perspective of a child who, in her attempts to grieve, seems to only aggravate and upset those around her. Among a selection of films interested in the non-normative, Amiko stands out in its use of the surreal as a comfort, while not losing sight of the inner-lives of those looking at and after those we don’t really understand. A fantastic performance by young Kana Osawa in Yusuke Morii’s first feature.”

Hiroki Kono’s J005311 also gained a special mention for, as explained in the following comment, “its considerable formal ambition and willingness to challenge us as viewers. Made with a profound sense of economy – both in terms of its restrained yet complex execution, but also its maximisation of clearly limited means – it manages to give us a gripping, intimate and provocative filmic ride.”

Other films screened in this year’s Next Generation strand included: Yurina Kaneko’s People Who Talk to Plushies Are Kind, Aimi Natsuto’s Saga Saga, Ryohei Sasatani’s Sanka: Nomads of the Mountain, and Yuho Ishibashi’s When Morning Comes, I Feel Empty. The winner of the Obayashi prize will receive receive a trophy and monetary award of US$3,000.

Our coverage of JAPAN CUTS 2023 continues here. You can also keep up with all the latest news from Japan Society New York and the year-round film programme by following them on Letterboxd, Instagram,  Facebook, and Twitter.

Killing Romance (킬링 로맨스, Lee Won-suk, 2023) [Fantasia 2023]

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A once famous actress sets out to reclaim her autonomy from an abusive, controlling, billionaire husband in Lee Won-suk’s hilariously off the wall comedy Killing Romance (킬링 로맨스). Partly a satire on the extreme power of wealth, social inequalities in contemporary South Korea, toxic masculinity and rampant patriarchy, along with the stigma of failure and loserdom, the film is also an inspirational rallying cry to break of oppressive social codes and embrace your authentic self even if others don’t quite understand. 

It’s a sudden fall from grace for top star Yeo-rae (Lee Hanee) that causes her to rethink her career goals when a sci-fi movie she starred in becomes a cult hit for all the wrong reasons leaving her a national laughing stock derided for her poor performance. Deciding to get out of the spotlight for a while, she travels to the remote island of Qualla but is immediately mugged by locals and rescued by mysterious Korean billionaire environmentalist Jonathan (Lee Sun-kyun) who sees them off with a well placed Taekwondo neck chop. One has to wonder if Jonathan had that set up, but in any case Yeo-rae soon falls in love with her handsome suitor and the pair marry. 

But seven years later it’s clear the marriage has not been a success. Yeo-rae is miserable, trapped in the ostentatious house Jonathan has had built in Seoul which is covered in oversize pictures of himself in muscle poses. He controls everything in her life right down to what she eats because he likes her at a certain weight and even goes so far as to cancel a job offer on her behalf telling the director of a movie she wanted to star in that she’s mentally ill while pelting her with tangerines for daring to envision a life as anything but a doll for him to play with. 

His control over her is born of a sense insecurity that his money cannot cover. Attempting to strike an alpha male persona, Jonathan wears a fake moustache and struts around in ostentatious outfits but is also always accompanied by his well-built bodyguard Bob while waited on hand and foot by twin servants he refers to as “The Susans”. The romantic song he uses to control Yeo-rae through a kind of brainwashing isn’t even his own but a pop hit from 1997, while Yeo-rae tries to recover herself by singing her own iconic hit Yeo-raeism (a repurposed version of the classic hit by Rain, Rainism) with its defiant chorus of “I’m gonna be a bad girl” in her attempt to shake off Jonathan’s patriarchal programming. 

Jonathan’s bid for hyper masculinity, his hatred of losing, is subverted in the the softness of Yeo-rae’s top fan Bum-woo (Gong Myung) who is perpetual student on his fourth attempt to get into Seoul University in the hope of fulfilling familial expectations. On realising his new next-door neighbour is none other than his favourite idol, Bum-woo figures out that she’s trapped and abused by Jonathan and is determined to rescue her even if it means killing him but is in reality too nice to carry it through. A bizarre series of assassination plots using paper aeroplanes and Jonathan’s personal kryptonite peanuts along with an attempt to steam him to death in a sauna flounder when a remorseful Bum-woo saves him at the last second potentially swayed by Jonathan’s promise to “change his life” in gratitude. But in the end neither he nor Yeo-rae are fully capable of actually killing him or escaping his control. After all, “Jonathan is above the law” as Yeo-rae laments.

Then again, even he seems to be a little swayed by her song as do his yellow-clad henchmen slowly moving to the music persuaded by her beat over his. The battle ends in a huge sing-off in which Yeo-rae is joined by her ever supportive fan club and finally gets to dance to her own tune accompanied by a cohort of “losers” fighting back against sneering chaebol oppression though vengeance eventually comes from an unexpected source. Quirky in the extreme, Lee plays with a retro ‘70s aesthetic framing the story as a fairytale performed Log Lady-style by an old woman for a TV children’s book hour while throwing in constant references to ostriches and tangerines along with zany karaoke and musical sequences in a deadpan fantasia of self-actualisation that is quite simply sublime.

Killing Romance screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Ghost Man (幽霊男, Motoyoshi Oda, 1954)

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Employees at a small nude modelling agency find themselves in the firing line when a “bloodsucking painter” escapes from a psychiatric institution in Motoyoshi Oda’s adaptation of Seishi Yokomizo’s Ghost Man (幽霊男, Yurei Otoko). Though produced by Toho and helmed by the director of The Invisible Man, the film does not particularly make use of special effects and as it turns out, Ghost Man is just a creepy name for a weird villain rather than an accurate description of a supernatural threat. 

Even so, you’d expect someone who runs a modelling agency to be on high alert after hearing that a crazed painter who is a danger to women is on the loose, but the manager of the Mutual Art Club simply assumes it must be an eccentric artist thing when he’s presented with a business card from “Ghost Man” Sugawa. Ghost Man is dressed in an unsettling outfit and is immediately rough with the model he picks out, Keiko, all of which you would think would have the manager thinking twice about allowing her to go with him. Some of the other girls urge her to turn the job down, but Keiko is the breadwinner for her family and work has been thin on the ground so she agrees to take it only to realise Ghost Man does indeed intend to kill her on arrival at an abandoned house way out in the country. 

“What a single woman has to do to earn a living, it’s both thrilling…and terrifying,” one of the other women, Ayuko, tells her boyfriend Ken (Yu Fujiki) after she quits the agency to become a stripper and decides to take to the stage despite knowing that Ghost Man may try to kill her during the show. Her words hint at a transgressive frisson of danger which she at least has chosen to embrace, an icy glint in her eye as she encourages Ken to pay close attention to her performance which she claims will be “wonderful”. Nevertheless, it also makes clear that the work the women do at the agency is necessarily unsafe given that it involves travelling to the home of a man they don’t know where they will be expected to undress. 

For reasons the film doesn’t quite explain, the models are also members of the “Bizarro Enthusiast Club” led by Dr. Kano (Joji Oka) who is the head doctor at the psychiatric hospital from which the bloodsucking painter, Tsumura (Ren Yamamoto), escaped. Meanwhile, Dr. Kano also seems to have a sideline in taking the girls to remote locations for nude photoshoot parties. In all honesty, he’s quite suspicious especially seeing as he seems to instinctively know how to open the tricky door at the abandoned house where Keiko’s body is found. Then again, we’re also told that Tsumura was once a member of the club with at least some suggesting that he ended up getting too into the bizarre and going out of his mind to the extent that he began committing weird acts of crime of his own. 

The lesson might be that getting overly obsessed with the occult and esoteric is unhealthy, only it turns there’s something else going on entirely that isn’t really about anything “weird” but caused by completely banal negative human emotions resulting from spurned romantic interest and the fear of parental disappointment. This being a Kindaichi mystery, the famous detective soon makes his appearance (played by a hardboiled Seizaburo Kawazu) only in a less eccentric guise and accompanied by a more efficient Todoroki who assists him as he begins to put the pieces together to solve the mystery. 

The villain may be taking advantage of a historical moment in allowing others to think his face is bandaged to disguise a disfigurement like those of many men wounded in the war, as was the case in another Kindaichi case The Inugami Family, but is also harking back to the Invisible Man while his accomplice adopts a much more “monstrous” appearance with buck teeth and the two missing fingers on his hand along with the insectile movements that play into the spider-themed finale. Oda has a lot of fun with the villain’s Phantom of the Opera-esque antics which include recording a tape to taunt the police along with a public announcement of “Act 3” of his ongoing drama to be staged at the “Reijin Theatre” which literally means “the beautiful lady show” but is also a minor pun that makes it sound a little “Ghost Man Theatre” in true B-movie villain fashion. Even so, there’s an underlying darkness in the serial killer drama most particularly in the scrapbook the villain makes with photos of the dead women posed and titled as works of art as if they were never any more alive than the mannequins he often substitutes for them. Striking in its set pieces and unsettling design, Oda’s strange drama is surprisingly nasty and actually quite cynical even as it unmasks its villain as little more than a ghost of man who hid behind the spectre of unease to mask his cowardice and insecurity.

The Three Sisters of Tenmasou Inn (天間荘の三姉妹, Ryuhei Kitamura, 2022)

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Caught in a space of existential limbo, a young woman struggles with the uncertain nature of life. What’s the point of living in a world that might end, she asks herself, seemingly not having realised that it’s as it always was, the world is always ending and may blink out at any given second. Ryuhei Kitamura’s adaptation of the manga by Tsutomu Takahashi The Three Sisters of Tenmasou Inn (天間荘の三姉妹, Tenma so no San Shimai) plays out a little like a mashup of Hirokazu Korea’s Afterlife and Our Little Sister, but ultimately meditates on how to live on in the shadow of loss.

After all, as the relentlessly cheerful heroine Tamae (Non) later says, life is hard but the world is not so bad and everyone has their part to play. That’s something she discovers for herself after falling into a coma following a traffic accident and arriving at Tenmasou Inn in the picturesque seaside town of Mitsuse. As is explained to her, the inn exists in a liminal space between Heaven and Earth where those caught between life and death are expected to make a choice on their direction of travel. 

But Tamae begins to enjoy her time at Tenmasou in part after learning that the owner’s daughters, Nozomi (Yuko Oshima) and Kanae (Mugi Kadowaki), are her half-sisters. They are fully aware of their liminal status and that unlike Tamae they can never return to the mortal world or make any kind of life for themselves in Mitsuse where time stands still. Nevertheless, Tamae’s relentless cheerfulness and knack for human empathy prove key assets, beginning to return an energy and warmth that has those around her giving new thought to their cosmic inertia and if it’s really possible to go on living in a constant state of timelessness. 

Tamae might want to stay, experiencing for the first time the sense of family that she’s searched for all her life. She considers giving up the rest of her time to stay with them, but is reminded that no one can stay in this transient place forever while this version of Mitsuse which seems to hang over the “real life” town may soon disappear. Those who live there describe it as like living in a dream, a confusing simulacrum of life in which no time passes. There are those who make the eventual decision to pass on towards rebirth while others opt to stay, still having unfinished business or perhaps just not quite yet ready. 

Recalling the 2011 tsunami, the film touches on the difficult subject of survivor’s guilt and how to come to terms with loss on a mass scale while Tamae tries to process what it means to live and to not to. She resolves that “people don’t end when they die” but live on in the memories of those who remember them, though her conviction that she must live on as a kind of conduit for the souls of others may also rob her of a degree of her selfhood in her own right to live simply as herself.

Even so as she admits life is hard. An old woman suffering with liver cancer who had been blind for many years looks for beauty in the afterlife only to be reminded that there are beautiful things everywhere if you take the time to look. She too has had a life of sadness, but discovers that it might not be too late to make up for lost time, while a very young woman who felt herself to be alone learns that she has a friend and there are those who care for her even she did nearly burn the inn down in a fit of temper. Unabashedly sentimental, the film is as much about moving on as it is about learning to live in the present as the various guests contemplate whether to return to the world of the living with all of its pain and loneliness, or proceed to that of the dead knowing that there’s no guarantee the next life will be any better. Melancholy but also in its way uplifting, Kitamura’s empathetic drama eventually settles on a note of poignancy in which the act of living becomes its own memorial and defiant act of remembrance in the face of constant and unexpected loss.

The Three Sisters of Tenmasou Inn screens in New York Aug. 6 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Mad Cats (Reiki Tsuno, 2023) [Fantasia 2023]

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The captive felines of Japan are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore in Reiki Tsuno’s absurd action comedy, Mad Cats. Sick of mistreatment and exploitation at the hands of humans who breed them for sale, these cats have transformed into a cult-like band of vigilantes thanks to a forbidden ancient Egyptian catnip that grants superpowers unearthed by a cat-loving Egyptologist who has been missing for the previous two years.

Mune (So Yamanaka) had been the responsible brother and in his extended absence, Taka (Sho Mineo) has become an irresponsible layabout behind on his rent and surrounded by old food cartons. A cassette tape delivered in a letter addressed only with his first name alerts him to the fact his brother is being held captive in a place where they once found a black cat and needs rescuing while he should also make sure to pick up a small wooden box on his way. Taka jumps straight on his bike, but unfortunately is not the sharpest knife in the drawer and finds himself ill-equipped to face off against the Mad Cats who are only more annoyed when he makes off with the their secret stash of forbidden Egyptian catnip.

Despite becoming anthropomorphised the cat women (they are all female cats) still behave in noticeably feline ways with their strange grins and vacant eyes not mention to weird head tilts and cat-like gestures such as pawing the air or slapping an opponent when otherwise not armed with axes or nunchucks. Later Taka is joined by another mysterious woman, Ayane, who apparently once belonged to the same cat lady cult but is somehow immune to the catnip aside from having become human and is determined to stop the others from going too far on their quest for revenge against human cruelty. 

Perhaps you can’t really blame them for that, though their vengeance does take on a rather ironic quality as they keep Mune tied up in a cage and force him to eat like a cat hunched over on his knees with his hands bound. Meanwhile, Taka teams up with a homeless man who is also enjoys cat food and is forever complaining that he’s not supposed to be here he just got swept up in some bizarre events while minding his own business. Takezo (Yuya Matsuura) also seems to be somewhat displaced, estranged from his wife and family and like Taka is looking for a way to go home even if he didn’t have running away from mad cats on his bingo card. 

The pair of them go through a training bootcamp thanks to Ayane but otherwise continue to flounder, forgetting everything they’ve learnt and cowering cartoonishly when faced with a marauding cat hoping Ayane will arrive to save them after all. Then again, they aren’t particularly bothered about trying to save the corrupt pet shop owners who callously breed cats for sale in poor conditions to possibly unsuitable people, perhaps sympathising with their concerns as genuine cat lovers reevaluating their thinking around pet “ownership”. 

Rounding out the absurdity, Tsuno adds in a series of action set pieces featuring cat-like choreography as Ayane squares off against the rest of the Mad Cats who are otherwise dressed in eerie white gowns like the members of a bizarre cult living an isolated existence in the mountains. From the cassette tape to the roller diner where Taka and Takezo are first attacked, the film has a quirky, retro sensibility that is perfectly in tune with its absurdity even as the guys drive around a borrowed car that has a registration plate reading “killer blow” while tracked by the seemingly unstoppable Mad Cats who, as we later realise, really do have nine lives. There is something quite touching underneath the strange allusions to Egyptian cat gods, superpowered catnip, and vengeful felines in the strength of the relationships not just between the brothers but between cats and their guardians despite the vengeful mission of the Mad Cats who reject their captivity by ridding themselves of irresponsible cat traffickers. Deadpan and surreal, the film has an infectious sense of fun in its boundless inventiveness and quirky composition while also carrying a more serious message about animal cruelty and responsible pet guardianship in a world in which even the lives of living creatures have been commodified.

Mad Cats screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Teaser trailer (dialogue free)

From the End of the World (世界の終わりから, Kazuaki Kiriya, 2023)

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Charged with the responsibility of saving the world, a teenage girl wonders if she should in Kazuaki Kiriya’s pre-apocalyptic drama, From the End of the World (世界の終わりから, Sekai no Owari kara). After all, the suffering will continue. People will continue to be cruel and selfish. Maybe it’s better to let humanity fizzle out and least save the planet. But really whether any of this is “real” or not, what’s she’s looking for is an escape from her grief and loneliness and a world that is a little kinder and less self-destructive. 

Shortly after losing her grandmother, who had been raising her after her parents were killed in a car accident, Hana (Aoi Ito) begins having strange dreams where she’s cast back to what seems to be feudal Japan where she meets a young indigenous girl whose family have been wiped out by marauding samurai. The girl’s guardian, an older woman (Mari Natsuki), explains to her that her arrival in this place has been foretold by some kind of scripture painted on the ceiling of a cave and that her duty is to deliver a letter to a shrine. Not too long later, she’s accosted by some kind of mysterious authority which seems very interested in her dreams, eventually taking her to a strange base in another cave where she meets an old woman (also Mari Natsuki) who looks exactly like the one saw in her dream. The world will apparently end in two week’s time, though she alone has the ability to alter what has been written through the power of her dreams which allows her to change people’s thoughts and thereby rewrite their destiny. 

She does not do this deliberately, but reacts instinctively to the events she encounters which the old woman claims exist in the “Sea of Sentiment”, a great confluence of human thought on which the world is built. “Understanding things is overrated. Everything’s an illusion. What’s important is your feelings,” another mysterious presence (Kazuki Kitamura) tells her, a man who exists between dream and reality and would rather the world end because as long as it exists he cannot die. In some respects, he may represent Hana’s depression suggesting that to continue to live is only to prolong her suffering and that it’s better for everyone to simply give in and let fate take its course while she weighs up kindness and vengeance using her newfound powers for “selfish” reasons to end the torment she’s been suffering at the hands of a bullying classmate who’s long been blackmailing her in taking advantage of her precarious position as a financially disadvantaged orphan. 

The quest that the old woman sends her on is really into the depths of her own heart which is wounded not only by a medical issue she seems to have forgotten but a pair of childhood traumas buried behind a door she did not want to open. The real message that she’s supposed to deliver has its own paradoxical sense of poignancy, “from the end of the world to you in the future”, which signals her nihilism and despair but also a desire for some kind of continuation or rebirth in a better, kinder world less marked by suffering or selfishness. Then again, the way of achieving that world is still rooted in violence only of a more knowing kind that heads off one particular kind of disaster and allows Hana to save “herself” in all her incarnations, but perhaps doesn’t do very much to change the human “foolishness” to which the old woman ascribes humanity’s destruction.  

Logically, it doesn’t quite hang together and not all of it makes sense (understanding things is overrated), but it has its own kind of internal consistency even if at times somewhat incoherent as it well might be if it were all the dream of a lonely teenage girl who’s given up on the idea of a future for herself because her life has been too full of suffering and unfairness. It’s no coincide the date of the end of the world is set for the same day as her high school graduation ceremony. Her world really is ending if in a less literal way leaving her all alone and forced into a more concrete adulthood while her peers get to chase their dreams a little longer by moving on to higher education while she’ll have to look for work to support herself. She may feel that nothing she does makes any difference and that she is powerless to change her fate, but also realises that she is not as alone as she thought. Featuring top notch production values and some striking production design, Kiriya’s sci-fi action drama is quietly touching in its final resolution that despite everything Hana still wants to love the world even if it’s making it very difficult. 

From the End of the World screens in New York Aug. 5 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Teaser trailer (no subtitles)