WE 12 (12怪盜, Berry Ho Kwok-man, 2023)

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Phenomenally popular Cantopop boyband Mirror have been dominating the Hong Kong box office lately with several of the guys playing regular roles in movies not particularly designed as vehicles for their star persona such as Anson Lo’s turn in arty horror It Remains, or Lokman Yeung in Mad Fate. We 12 (12怪盜) is however the first time the band have made a movie altogether as an ensemble star vehicle and is clearly intended for their many devoted fans filled as it is with what seem to be in jokes and references to the guys’ “real” personas or at least those of the “character” they play in terms of their membership of Mirror.

The guys’ solo projects and movie work are perhaps hinted at in the film’s central thesis, if you can call it that, in that the boys have been doing too many solo missions and have lost their team spirit. In the universe of the film, they’re a kind of crime fighting zodiac who do things like save princesses and conduct jewel heists. Each of the band members, who use similar character names, is introduced with a special power which ranges from the ability to converse telepathically with animals to the nebulous “strategic planning” and the downright plain “abseiling” which seems particularly unfair given that any of the other guys could obviously learn to abseil too and then he wouldn’t have a power anymore.

In any case, their group mission is to stop a mad scientist from activating a device which can send mosquitos to other universes because it would destroy our ecosystem. Meanwhile other scientists are working on creating a “right-wing chicken” which turns out to be less political than it sounds and in fact much more absurd, along with a series of other cancer causing foods just in case you weren’t sure if they were really “evil” or not. Even so, the plot isn’t really important more a means of tying the silliness together given that focus is split between the 12 guys who each have their particular moment to shine and personalised gags. When the big job goes wrong because they decided to all do their own thing rather than work as a team, they have to come back together again and rediscover the equilibrium of Kaito (i.e. Mirror). 

Which is all to say, it’s a little impenetrable to the uninitiated but fans of the band will doubtless be in heaven. It’s all in the grand tradition of boyband popstar movies in which the silliness is sort of the point in generating a sense of conspiracy with fans that they’re the ones who get the jokes because of their intimate relationships with the stars. The film also features extended cameos from fellow Cantopop group Error who play their back up team and have a few gags of their own, while Malaysian actress and star of Table for Six Lin Min Chen also has a small cameo as the kidnapped princess. 

The best performance comes however from The Sparring Partner’s Yeung Wai-lun as the slimy security manager Johnny who is obsessed with order and dresses in fascist uniform so obviously out of keeping with the silliness and absurdity the boys represent in a mild kind of rebellion towards anything serious or grown up society in general. There is something quite childish about the way the gags suddenly pop up out of nowhere along with the otherwise nonsensical nature of the film which isn’t so much a nonsense comedy like those of the 80s and 90s as much something totally random perhaps intended to express the essence of Mirror or at least that which its fans believe it to be. For all of these reasons, the film makes very little literal sense and does not hang together very well for anyone not already well versed in the world of the band but presumably plays out just fine for anyone with a 21st-century equivalent of a decoder ring and a silly sense of humour willing to join the boys for whatever crazy adventure they may be embarking on next.

WE 12 is on UK cinemas now courtesy of CineAsia.

Evil Does Not Exist (悪は存在しない, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023)

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Whatever happens upstream affects those further down according to the headman of a small village faced with incursion from city dwellers hoping to turn their peaceful idyll into a tourist hotspot in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s eco drama Evil Does Not Exist (悪は存在しない, Aku wa Sonzai Shinai). He reminds them that those at the top have a responsibility to those below, and it’s only because of this sense of mutual consideration that life is possible here. It’s an obvious metaphor for the contemporary society in which those with money and power have largely forgotten about those without, but then the film’s title also asks us a question. What is “evil”, does it exist or not, or is it merely in inextricable part of nature human and otherwise that balances out the good?

After a long tracking shot along the trees shot from below, Hamaguchi focuses on the figure of Takumi, a man at home in nature patiently sawing and cutting logs. He teams up with another man, Kazuo, to harvest water from a local stream we later realise is being used by an udon restaurant for a superior taste. Takumi shows him wild wasabi and explains how the locals use it, suggesting that Kazuo consider adding some to his dishes. Like him, Takumi’s daughter also seems to be at home in the forest, wandering off to walk home alone when Takumi inevitably forgets to pick her up from school.

Takumi describes himself as a “jack of all trades” or more to the point a local odd job man, but seems in many ways he’s one who keeps the balance. The problem they have now, is that a company from Tokyo has bought some land and is intent on stetting up a “glamping” resort in the village. A pair of agents turn up from the city to give a kind of question and answer session, but as one of the attendees later suggests it’s mainly to make themselves look good. Unable to answer most of the villagers’ quite reasonable questions all they can do is state they’ll take their opinions into account while offering flawed promises of financial gain and insistence that people from Tokyo will visit as if that were some kind of honour. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that the villagers maybe happy as they are and aren’t interested in further material gain while understandably wary of the effects of the resort on the local area from increased traffic and pollution. The agents encounter unexpected resistance centring on the septic tank which has been penciled in for an area which would lead to the contamination of wells and groundwater while it’s also clear that the company are determined to cost cut with the agents blithely telling them that a little bit of sewage in your drinking water never harmed anyone and in any case it’s within the permitted amount. 

Others ask questions about fire risk and understaffing with the agents later asking Takumi to become the resort’s caretaker, insulting him with the implication that he’s some kind of layabout easily bought with a fat paycheque. He corrects them that he has a job and doesn’t need the money, though they persist with asking him to be a kind of advisor. Takahashi, a jaded manager, is soon captivated by the area and in particular Takumi’s manliness in his log splitting and mysterious demeanour but there’s something inevitably harsh and unforgiving about nature even if it’s man that has corrupted it. Gunshots are heard over the horizon, men hunting deer. Takumi and Hana walk past the carcass of one who bled out from a bullet wound and was presumably just left there dying for no real reason. Takumi tells the agents that their site is on a deer path, so they’d need high fences which might put the customers off but reflecting that wild deer aren’t usually “dangerous” unless they’re sick or have been shot. Takumi asks where the deer are supposed to go but gets only a shrug of the shoulders and “somewhere else” from Takahashi, but there are only so many other places, what if this is the last one? If you continue to displace things, there won’t be anywhere left for anyone.

Still, as Takumi says it’s not that villagers have already decided to resist the glamping project, only that they want their fair complaints to be addressed and are willing to engage with the process if only the agents would treat them with a little more respect. But that’s something thin on the ground from the execs in Tokyo who think they’re all a load of bumpkins easily bought off with promises of a better economic future. To Takumi it is really a matter of balance, something that should be maintained for one’s protection as much as anything else. The ominous score which frequently cuts out abruptly adds to an edge of unease and supernatural dread in the ancientness of the natural world even if as Takumi points out this isn’t their ancestral land. It’s a new village that originated in the immediate post-war era when returning soldiers were given land to farm. They are all to some degree outsiders, as perhaps are humans in this inhuman place, but also ones who’ve found a way to live in it that’s as much about respect for the land and others as it is about survival.

Evil Does Not Exist opens in UK cinemas of 5th April courtesy of Modern Films.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Heavy Snow (폭설, Yun Su-ik, 2023)

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“It’s obvious it was a romance, why did you pretend it wasn’t?” one wounded woman asks another while their connection seems to be frustrated by internalised shame and conflicting desires. Yun Su-ik’s frosty drama Heavy Snow (폭설, pokseol) does indeed seem to suggest that their love for each other can only exist in a kind of otherworld, eventually segueing into a metaphysical realm which simultaneously implies that this isn’t actually a romance but self-reflection and interrogation as a tomboyish actress searches for herself inside her various roles.

Indeed, Su-an (Han Hae-in) views Seol (Han So-hee) with a kind of awe which might be understandable given that Seol is a TV drama superstar improbably transferring to her rural arts school for a break from the world of showbiz. Or as Seol would later imply, because she’s become too difficult to manage and is rebelling against the emptiness of her ostensibly glamorous life through increasing acts of reckless self-harm. Su-an might wonder if that’s all her flirtation is, an attempt to flaunt a taboo while otherwise puzzled and jealous as to why someone like Seol would actually be interested in her. 

Yet Su-an’s interest is also in part idolisation, attracted to Seol because she fears she is everything she wants to be but isn’t, beautiful and talented. But Seol seems to doubt she’s either of those things while otherwise superficially confident in her sexuality and drawn to Su-an because of her ordinariness. Experiencing a moment of identity crisis, she’s looking for herself outside the frame yet also perhaps like Su-an caught in moment of self-idolisation. Noticing one of the giant billboards of her face that the litter the city she briefly touches it before walking away as if attracted to an image of herself she recognises and doesn’t. 

Yet it seems it’s less the awkwardness of too much intimacy that causes Su-an to pull away when Seol kisses her than shame. She tells Seol that she thinks it isn’t right, and perhaps goes on to regret that decision while continually pining for an idealised teenage love. The two women in a sense trade places. Years later Su-an is a famous TV actress, having in a way taken over the image of Seol, while Seol is evidently no longer acting but a depressed and defeated figure still resentful of Su-an’s rejection. The effects of their shifting fame deepen the gap between them with the teenage Su-an further nervous in her relationship with Seol knowing the danger that her celebrity presents. There is a suggestion that their creative desires conflict with the romantic, that they feel they cannot embrace their sexuality freely and remain in the entertainment industry because of the intense pressures a conservative society places on prominent people to be shining examples of moral purity. Each of them appear to become worn out by the demands of their fame, Su-an turning to drugs in attempt to mask her depression while the teenage Seol ponders quitting acting to become more her authentic self.

In the dreamlike third act which commences at the sea, a touchstone for each of the women connected to the innocence of their teenage romance, may suggest that in looking for Seol Su-an is really looking for herself or perhaps simply to recapture the person she was at the beginning of everything. At odds with each other, the two women become marooned in a snowbound land with no one else around. Finally repairing their relationship, it seems that they can only embrace their love in this barren place where no one else exists to judge them. The implication maybe that as Seol says the things Su-an wants to say to Seol she really wants to say to herself in a desire for self-acceptance, but equally that we can’t be sure that any of this “real” rather than dream or wishfulment.  In any case all that remains is a painful longing either for an unrealised love or the elusive self. 

Hinting at the pressures of the contemporary society, the unrealistic expectations placed on those in entertainment industry and outward social conservatism the film never less presents its central romance with an evenhanded poignancy even in its continuing impossibility as the two women continue to look for the self in each other but seemingly struggling to see past the hollow images of their own self-projections.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Heavy Snow screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Tokarev (トカレフ, Junji Sakamoto, 1994)

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The discovery of a pistol concealed under a vending machine provokes a prolonged crisis of power and masculinity in Junji Sakamoto’s tense psychological drama, Tokarev (トカレフ). So named for the guns at its centre, the film roots itself in post-Bubble anxiety in the push and pull between two very different men mediated through the kidnapping of an innocent child who in the end pays a very heavy price for the anxieties and resentments that drive his parents’ generation.

That said, the kidnappers are actually very nice to little Takashi who looks strangely happy in the videotaped ransom note as the friendly voice of a youngish man encourages him to look towards the camera. They take him to an amusement park, buy him new shoes and ice cream, and even let him wave the gun around during the money drop but are it seems otherwise callously indifferent to his fate.

The boy’s father, Nishiumi (Takeshi Yamato), has just moved onto a danchi housing estate with his wife Ayako (Yumi Nishiyama). They seem very excited to start their new life, yet the danchi itself speaks of a post-war aspiration which now seems dated and largely absent in the contemporary society. Nishiumi drives the bus to the local kindergarten picking up the surprisingly large number of children from their block each morning. Meanwhile, their neighbour, Matsumura (Koichi Sato) seems irritated by their presence perhaps jealous of their happy family life as he returns home alone and angrily flips the cover over his motorbike before opening the door. 

On the morning in question, Matsumura has trouble kickstarting his bike yet Ayako seems strangely drawn to him perhaps attracted by a different and older kind of masculinity. Unlike her husband, Matsumura wears a suit to work everyday and carries a little salaryman-style purse yet he works a job that could be considered manual in a printing press where they produce newspapers. He later excitedly tells Ayako that he gets to read the news before anyone else, though his hands glide over notices of violent crimes including a shooting which may seem additionally exciting to him given that he is the man who discovered a gun under a vending machine in Christmas-set opening sequence. His cluttered home otherwise at odds with the sense of order he projects is full of old newspapers while he seems to listen to the same weather broadcast every day. 

The gun is later used by another man who fires it at Nishiumi before abducting Takashi from the kindergarten bus. It takes Nishiumi a few seconds to realise it’s Takashi who’s been taken, suddenly taking off at speed after him endangering the lives of the other kids. The sense of guilt and inadequacy slowly consumes him. “Takashi must be so disappointed,” he later laments to Ayako over the phone in his failure to live up to the socially defined codes of masculinity. His son was taken from him in front of his eyes yet he couldn’t do anything to save him. Matsumura meanwhile turns up near the crime scene having been shot in the shoulder claiming the kidnapper stole his bike. 

Perhaps it’s this uncanny proximity along with his odd expression and obvious effect on Ayako that leads Nishiumi to believe that Matsumura was somehow involved in the crime. In another instance of mid-90s technophobia, the clue is once again discovered via videotape as a guiltridden Nishiumi spots Matsumura in the crowd at his son’s sports day which is odd considering he has no children of his own and no reason to be there. The kidnapper also films the random drop on camcorder, black and white images capturing a crowded Shibuya presumably as some kind of insurance plan.

After being attacked and seriously injured, Nishiumi ends up in hospital where he ironically discovers a gun of his own stashed in the restroom by a visiting yakuza. As it had Matsumura, the gun gives him a new sense of power but also drives him into a frenzied obsession, dressing like a yakuza himself in a suit and dark glasses having alienated Ayako who eventually leaves him for Matsumura who has by this point usurped him as a man and patriarch, taking everything he ever had. No longer wishing to live, he embarks on a suicide mission to get his revenge on Matsumura. The pair of them essentially trade places, Matsumura now in check shirt and jeans while Nishiumi approaches in a suit each of them corrupted by the illusionary power of the gun. 

It later transpires that the kidnapper was also facing a crisis of masculinity in that his business was about to go bust, though Nishiumi was not a wealthy man or particularly good candidate for a ransom. The police, who are in fact completely useless, bungling their only opportunity to retrieve Takashi because they were caught off guard by the kidnapper giving him the gun, keep asking him if there’s anyone who might have held a grudge but as he points out there must have been thousands of incidents of petty annoyance that may have pushed someone over the edge dating all the way back to his childhood. The battle he finds himself in is one of vengeance to reclaim his wounded sense of masculinity while Matsumura in turn is determined to defend the new life he’s bought for himself or perhaps stolen from Nishiumi as a happy family man. Sakamoto keeps the tension high through the near wordless closing sequence in which the two men square off against each other with the intention of meeting their endgame each victims of the pervading sense of futility of the post-Bubble era.

Performing Kaoru’s Funeral (カオルの葬式, Noriko Yuasa, 2024)

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According to an undertaker in Noriko Yuasa’s darkly comic drama Performing Kaoru’s Funeral (カオルの葬式, Kaoru no Ososhiki) death is a kind of natural disaster. Despite the sometimes farcical going ons at this particular funeral, he does indeed have point in the sense of inevitable tragedy that the colours events as a dejected middle-aged man attempts to clarify his memories while overseeing the funeral of a woman he was once married to but evidently had not seen in many years.

To this extent, as the title says, Jun is “performing” Kaoru’s funeral though perhaps it’s true enough that there’s always an degree of performance in involved. As Kaoru’s young daughter, also named Kaoru, says, no one here believes in god or Buddha and this ritualised mourning process doesn’t seem to be helping her process her grief. From time to time, Yuasa cuts back to a Bruegel-esque image of a painting of hell complete with demons staring pots with people in boiling water suggesting that this too is a kind of purgatorial hellscape.

Suddenly tasked with MCing his former wife’s funeral Jun takes it with good grace if also a little confusion. Guests mainly seem to be using it as an opportunity to vent their dissatisfaction or settle old grievances. The atmosphere is strange, somehow fraught and otherworldly while the other guests seem to treat Jun as an interloper never really considering that he may be grieving too. The ritualised act of performing the funeral causes him to remember his married life along with the woman who seems to have remained an enigma to him and may have done so to everyone. 

Once an aspiring actor, Jun is now a defeated figure employed as a driver for girls working at a Soapland. Before receiving the call about the funeral he’s beaten up by a pair of gangsters after intervening when one of them tried to assault the girl he was driving. Presented in a boxy square, Jun’s flashback memories have an unreal quality as if his marriage was a kind of fairytale or a dream he was woken from too soon. Kaoru’s decision to make him the chief mourner at her funeral may in a sense have been ironic, a final acknowledgement of the role he played in her life but also grants him a valuable opportunity to set the past to rest and perhaps begin to move on. 

For some of the other guests, however, that doesn’t quite seem to be the case. Some lie about their relationship with Kaoru or else cause unexpected trouble in venting a petty grievance. A rival screenwriter turns up to get drunk and make catty remarks, while a middle-aged man also uses the occasion to lay into his daughter-in-law with a lengthy misogynistic rant about his unmanly son’s inability to manage his wife. Little Kaoru seems largely left on her own, expected to carry out these rituals while grieving for her mother with no real support. A small subplot revolves around the potential candidates for her father, but none of them, bar perhaps Indonesian restaurant owner Wayan and Jun himself who claims she cannot be his pays much attention to her.

After opening with a grim scene of Kaoru on the slab, much the action is accompained by the urgent sound of something ticking as if marking out the passage of time while lending a sense of urgency to something that is no longer really urgent. Brought together by her deaths, the guests each have their own relationship with the deceased and like Jun and little Kaoru perhaps begin to process their grief and move step forward though in other ways also the opposite in one’s near literal inability to let go. The girl Jun had been escorting found an abandoned urn on the train and took it home with a kind of perverse delight musing on the reasons someone might leave their urn behind. In a way, that’s what Jun is trying to do, let his past drift away, Kaoru somehow setting him free to start living his life again after he sees her off. As the screenwriter said every script has to have a moment of catharsis and Yuasa’s tragicomic tale does indeed have its share of melancholy poignancy but ends on a bittersweet note of thank you and farewell as Jun and little Kaoru sail off into a new future having laid the past to rest.

Performing Kaoru’s Funeral screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Yakuza Hooligans (893 愚連隊, Sadao Nakajima, 1966)

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“The world has changed,” an old school street thug is repeatedly reminded after his release from prison into a new Japan amid the tides of rising prosperity. An early effort from Sadao Nakajima, Yakuza Hooligans (893 愚連隊, 893 Gurentai) situates itself in cultural and generational abyss among those who find themselves locked out of the new society and unable to escape the immediate post-war era in part perhaps because they may not really want to.

At least it seems that way for the central trio of “hooligans” who later explain to their sometime mentor that they aren’t doing petty crime because of a lack of other options but out of devilment and a childish rebellion against a world they feel doesn’t accept them. As the film opens, they’re running a petty scam luring queuing passengers into unlicensed cabs for which they are almost arrested, stiffing the cabbie that helps them escape and then conning a takoyaki vendor out of a free lunch. Several times they’re criticised for “bullying the weak,” most obviously in their sideline seducing women and forcing them into sex work or blackmailing men who sleep with them. 

They are, however, fairly weak themselves. They like to describe themselves as a “democratic” institution in which everyone is equal and everything is shared fairly but despite supposedly having no boss they’re bossed around by almost everyone and when challenged by actual yakuza quickly back down. A generation older, failed kamikaze Sugi is released from prison after spending 15 years behind bars for killing a Chinese man as part of a petty crime gang formed in the immediate chaos after the war. Unlike his former associate Kurokawa, Sugi too claims that he doesn’t see the point in having a boss but like the younger men flounders unable to see a place for himself in the new society.

Sugi doesn’t approve of the more immoral sides of their business, particularly the rape and trafficking of women but proves just how out of touch he is when he asks the guys why they can’t just swipe some rice or clothing. In the immediate post-war period, rice and kimono were the only things which held their value but in a newly consumerist Japan they’re in plentiful supply and in fact worth relatively little. While he was inside, his former girlfriend married someone else and had a child, burning the tattoo she once had of his name on her arm clean away. She tells him that she’s sorry, but she’s happy and she doesn’t want anything to disrupt the life she has now. Falling for a middle-aged woman unhappy in her marriage and subsequently forced into sex work by the gang, he dreams of a happy family life and ultimately risks all on a confrontation with his old yakuza pal Kurokawa.

The film seems to suggest that the writing’s on the wall for men like Kurokawa too. His old school world of regimented, authoritarian gangsterdom doesn’t fit in the new Japan anymore than Sugi’s corrupted post-war idealism. A subplot revolving around Ken, a mixed-race member of the gang who hates the way they treat women because his mother was raped by a US serviceman positions the Occupation as another source of corruption leaving nothing behind itself other than moral decline and lasting trauma. But as Nobuko later says as long as you’re alive you have to go on searching for something and if one place is the same as another then you might as well move. 

The hooligans, however, seem stuck in the past. They can’t stand up for themselves or mount any real resistance to their circumstances, continuing to “bully the weak” in an attempt to mask their own weakness until racing headlong towards a confrontation with the yakuza along a bridge which quite literally hasn’t been finished yet symbolising their mutual inability to progress into the new society. Shooting with a heavy dose of irony enhanced by the whimsical jazz score, Nakajima captures a sense of contemporary Kyoto as an alienating environment caught between the ancient and the modern in which men like Sugi and the hooligans are permanently displaced yet lack the desire to escape because the newly consumerist society has little to offer them. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Soul (緝魂, Cheng Wei-Hao, 2021)

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“Affection is the greatest obstacle on the path to success” according to the villain at the centre of Cheng Wei-Hao’s philosophical mystery, The Soul (緝魂, Jī Hún). Adapted from a science-fiction novel by Jiang Bo, Cheng’s near future tale has a series of questions to ask about legacy, family, love, and repression as its earnest investigator tries to come to terms with his oncoming end while living with treatment resistant cancer and trying to decide what is the best way to support his wife and unborn child in his impending absence. 

In 2032, police are called to the palatial estate of a local tycoon only to find him brutally murdered. Perhaps there’s nothing so shocking about that, powerful men have enemies, yet the strange thing is that Wang (Samuel Ku) was already dying of brain cancer and had a very short time left to live so there would seem to be little advantage in bumping him off early. The prime suspect is his disgruntled son Tien-yu (Erek Lin) who was seen leaving the mansion in a hurry and is known to bear a grudge against his father over his mother’s death while Wang’s much younger second wife Li Yen (Sun Anke) also identifies him as the killer. But there are definitely a few things which don’t add up here. Why is Wang’s business partner Wan named as his second choice as heir after Li Yen despite the rumours he had been having an affair with first wife Su-chen (Baijia Zhang), why are there security cameras in Li Yen’s bedroom, and why would a man with so little time left to live opt for an arranged marriage to an orphaned 20-year-old woman from one of the orphanages his philanthropic organisation supports?

Those are all questions which immediately present themselves to veteran investigator Liang (Chang Chen) whose own wife Pau (Janine Chang Chun-ning), also a policewoman, is pregnant with their child while he has just learnt that his cancer has resisted all treatment and may in fact be incurable. Deciding his remaining time may be best spent providing what he can for his family he asks his boss for his job back and specifically to be put on the Wang case, immediately homing in on the company’s radical new treatment for cancer through transplanting rejuvenated neurons directly into the brain. He begins to wonder what comes with it if you begin implanting neurons that belong to someone else but gets no reply from Wan in the middle of his sales pitch. 

Hinted at in the Chinese title the question that arises is that of the connection between soul and flesh and whether it becomes possible to achieve a kind of immortality through colonising brains in healthy bodies, an idea which might of course prove appealing to Liang if he were not so innately incorruptible. Then again as his wife says, perhaps it’s easier to die. It’s the ones left behind who have it hardest, suddenly left to deal with everything on their own. That might be why she finds herself tempted by their rather obvious conflict of interest in compromising her integrity to buy her husband a few more days while he wonders what the point of such a sacrifice might be.

Yet what we discover in the unhappy saga of the Wangs is both a megalomaniacal obsession with control that extends beyond one’s own lifetime and a tragic love story born of internalised shame that led to a lifetime of repression and unhappiness in the inability to be one’s authentic self. Liang describes the RNA treatment as an expression of the living’s obsession with the dead, while others describe it as “modern necromancy” oddly echoing the black magic which Su-chen, herself a neuroscientist, and her son had apparently been practicing in their intense resentment of Wang. Pau insists she’d rather believe a soul exists no matter in what form, but if you make division of yourself you may also face an unexpected existential threat born of your own internal conflicts and mutual desire for survival. A slow burn mystery, Cheng’s eerie drama has its share of hokum but nevertheless asks some pertinent questions about the nature of humanity in an increasingly technological age, what it is we leave behind and how it is we move forward (or not) with the process of letting go even as its ironic final moments provide a kind of justice emotional and literal in restoration of a family. 

Tsujiura Renbo (辻占恋慕, Daisuke Ono, 2021)

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Is there a point at which you should accept your artistic dreams won’t come true, cut your losses, and try to transition into a more conventional life? That’s the dilemma the heroes of Daisuke Ono’s Tsujiura Renbo (辻占恋慕) find themselves contending with while wondering if it’s better to compromise your artistic integrity and surrender to the realities of the contemporary entertainment industry or resign yourself to the idea of your art becoming merely a side gig rather than a full-time occupation. 

The dilemma is all the more acute for Shinta (Daisuke Ono) because he’s recently turned 30 and is experiencing a moment of existential crisis. The band he’s been in since college has never really got anywhere, and this particular evening his guitarist, Naoya, hasn’t even bothered to turn up. Luckily for him, a sullen young female folksinger, Emi (Saori), offers to accompany him for just the one track so that he can still try and rustle up some interest in a few CDs but it’s clear during their set that Emi has real star power effortlessly outshining him vocalising on his own song. Shinta thinks the gig is up, eventually deciding his efforts might be better placed in helping Emi receive the recognition she deserves becoming her manager after spending a weird night in her apartment which is also the office of her record label which has only one other artist and is essentially the last hurrah of an ancient retiree. 

Part of Emi’s problem is that she’s an old school folksy singer-songwriter with intense Meiko Kaji energy. Even those who support her worry her music’s too old-fashioned for a chart-obsessed industry while her tsundere personality is distinctly at odds with the traditional ways in which female artists are marketed in what is still an incredibly sexist environment. Emi had complained that the club at which she first met Shinta was populated largely by slightly creepy middle-aged men there to see the main act, underground idol star Azuki (Rena Kato) who specialises in upbeat yet bland pop and makes the majority of her money through meet and greet sessions with her top fans who are perhaps sometimes dangerously obsessed with her star persona. These kinds of fans aren’t generally interested in folk music, but even so Emi is repeatedly advised to go down the same path of selling handshakes and autographs to ticket buyers more interested in the fan experience than hearing anything she has to say.

To that extent, it’s odd that neither Shinta nor anyone considers harnessing her tsundere energy to hook a different kind of audience that might be attracted to her defiance rather than the bland cuteness represented by Azuki. Azuki meanwhile may be cynical but perhaps she’s also sensible, explaining to Shinta that after hearing he and the others earnestly discussing music she decided it was better to go in a different direction realising she’d soon age out of the underground idol demographic in which the average career might last only a few months, deciding to turn her idol persona into a marketable brand and more or less ignoring the musical part of her act altogether. Shinta begins to wonder if he’s been marketing her wrong, that he shouldn’t have tried to push Emi towards the mainstream but focus on her unique talent as an old school live act. 

Then again, each 30 years old and already exhausting their budget perhaps it’s simply too late to move beyond the live house circuit. A visit from a colleague of Emi’s at the callcentre where she works to make ends meet, herself an aspiring actress, warns him that Emi may be at her limit but unable to quit in part in fear of letting him down even as their relationship is constantly eroded by the pressures of trying to make their musical dream come true. She has real talent, but doing what it would take to become successful might kill it and her, a music critic from a big paper bluntly telling Shinta that though he can see her newer album is more “commercial” that’s only made it “bland” robbing it of everything that once made it interesting. If playing to crowds of weird old men who’ve only come because Azuki told them to is as good as it gets, maybe it’s best to accept defeat rather than watch Emi tear herself apart. As it turns out the reason Naoya never turned up to the gig was that he won big on pachinko and realised he had much more chance of making a life for himself on that than he ever had with music. Maybe it doesn’t work out in the end and all you have is “nostalgic love” for a period in time, but that might not be so bad in and of itself and the music will always be there for you whether anyone’s listening or not.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

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.