The Shock Labyrinth (戦慄迷宮3D, Takashi Shimizu, 2009)

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Is it a good idea to advertise your haunted a house attraction by making a movie in which people get trapped inside haunted house? Whether or not Shock Labyrinth (戦慄迷宮3D, Senritsu Meikyu 3D) had the desired effect of luring more guests to Fuji-Q Highland’s Labyrinth of Horrors is probably lost to time, though Takashi Shimizu’s 2009 ghostly drama is also a strange curio produced during the short-lived resurgence of 3D in the late 2000s though this, of course, also means that it was shot with the flattened aesthetics of early digital technology.

In essence, the film casts traumatic memory as a haunted space of the brain in which the protagonist is plagued by the disappearance of a friend inside the fairground attraction he and his friends snuck into as children. Yuki (Misako Renbutsu) makes a sudden reappearance when Ken returns to his hometown. She claims to have been trapped for a very long time, but has grown along with the others and her clothes have somehow grown with her so that she has the appearance of a ghostly adult woman who behaves like a child. When the gang try to take her to a hospital, they unwittingly end up back at the fake one from the fairground attraction and are forced to face their unresolved guilt and trauma.

Indeed, it seems most of them had completely forgotten about Yuki and got on with their lives. Gradually recovering his memories, Ken (Yuya Yagira) blames himself for Yuki’s death while Motoki, who denies all responsibility, becomes convinced that Yuki’s vengeful ghost brought them back here deliberately to get her revenge for them leaving her there. It’s true enough that the others all ran off after becoming frightened without thinking about Yuki and made no attempt to rescue her, and that they went into the haunted house while knowing they weren’t supposed to, but, on the other hand, they were all children and acted in ways children do. Then again, there were already ructions and petty jealousies dividing the group as it appears Ken was the more popular member liked by both Rin and Yuki, provoking a series of jealousies and resentment from Motoki who declares that he’s not going to bother save Rin because she didn’t love him anyway. Ironically, she’s just told Ken that Motoki was the only one who really cared about her when Ken only helped her out of a sense of pity because she is blind. Miyu, Yuki’s younger sister, had also been jealous of her for being so “perfect and nice” when she was always the “bad” one who got into trouble. 

This shock labyrinth is really the space of repressed memories that Ken talks about. What it seems Yuki wants, like many similar ghosts, is company and to trap her friends with her within this space, or at least as much as she’s a manifestation of Ken’s buried guilt, to prevent him from ever really forgetting her and going on with his life. Ken and the others desperately search for an exit, but are ultimately unable to overcome their traumatic memories. Yuki comes for them as soon as they remember what they did to her, as if they were really being stalked by their own repressed guilt and shame. Still never having dealt with the death of his mother, Ken dreams of her telling him not to go into the haunted hospital or Yuki will him as if she wanted to protect him from this harmful memory though repressing it is evidently as damaging as confronting the truth of the past.

The detectives meanwhile adopt the more rational view that Ken is responsible for everything having taken revenge on his friends for abandoning Yuki when they were children. Perhaps this is all really going on in the shock corridors of Ken’s mind as his traumatic memories have begun to leak out and distort his sense of reality. Then again, perhaps Yuki has found a way to come back for deadly game of hide and seek to keep her occupied in the between space of the fake haunted hospital with its creepy, decomposing mannequins and the unexpectedly gruesome plush rabbit backpack the young Yuki was forever carrying around and refused to let others touch. Either way, it seems Yuki will not let them go but will always be there in the dark corners of their minds to remind them what they’ve done.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Draft! (Setan Alas!, Yusron Fuadi, 2023)

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It’s easy to feel as if you’re trapped on a certain path and that unseen forces are dictating your life, leaving you with little power to overcome your fate. But what if you were really imprisoned inside the as yet unfinished script for a terrible movie by a lazy, half-hearted writer who can’t think of anything more interesting than killing you in horrifying ways while being constantly hassled by an equally dull producer who threatens to replace him with Joko Anwar? 

That is indeed the dilemma faced by those at the centre of Yusron Fuadi’s Indonesian meta horror, The Draft (Setan Alas!). The opening sequence follows them as they drive towards a remote country villa owned by rich girl Ani’s (Anggi Waluyo) recently divorced parents. As soon as they get there, they begin remarking on how it’s just like something out of an Indonesian horror movie complete with a Dutch cemetery not too far away and a creepy caretaker who seems to pop up out of nowhere. Predictably, the power’s gone out and the generator’s on the blink, so they’ll have to have atmospheric candles instead and obviously can’t get any phone signal to call for help. Ani’s also brought a photo of her apparently deceased younger sister, though none of that turns out to matter because the screenwriter’s about to forget about it. 

All of this heavy exposition is delivered in a very knowing manner, as if mocking the tropes of the Indonesian horror movie while simultaneously indulging in them until the gang suddenly figure out that they’re just characters in a half-written screenplay which is why they can’t really remember much of their pasts. As such, they’re desperately in search of “god”, or the writer, who alone has control over their fates and seems to have ill intentions for them while their only means of defence is to force him into a rewrite so they won’t die. After a while, they begin to work out how they can manipulate this world by influencing the writer’s thoughts when their joking speculation about might what happen next gives him ideas, so they can also write into their dialogue that there’s a massive stash of arms in the basement that will be very useful against the surprise zombie hordes. 

Meanwhile, in the real world, time passes for the writer who burns his motorbike and argues with his producer while constantly rewriting the screenplay to suit his preferences. The gang joke that there can’t be that many zombies coming because CGI’s too expensive, and no one would give a film with dialogue this bad a budget big enough to pay for thousands of extras. The writer is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. He either writes the film the producer wants with its generic plot and stereotypical characters or he doesn’t get to make a film at all.

The characters too are protesting being a part of this project and fighting for a movie along with a better life in which they have more light and shade, actual backstories and personalities both they and the audience can invest in. But increasingly, their author leaves them hanging as the real interferes with his screenwriting dreams and years go by with no more “revisions” leaving this film a perpetually unfinished draft that he may pick up again some day more out of idleness that ambition. The dream world of the movie seems to be forever receding like the cliff edge that prevents the characters from leaving, the abandoned drafts burning away as stripping layers from their reality. 

Trapped in this eternal state of limbo, they do at least realise they have an advantage and time to train, to write their own stories in the absence of their not quite so omniscient god. They might, after all, enjoy a life of “worldly pleasures without any consequences or commitment” while they wait as if this place too could be a kind of heaven free of any possible constraint save the inability to leave or to feel time passing and finally be allowed some kind of forward motion and growth. This project might be paused, indefinitely, and destined to live forever in the draw as an unfinished draft, but there might still be time to bring themselves into being while their inattentive creator perhaps does the same.

The Draft! is on UK and Ireland digital platforms 27 October.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Dead to Rights (南京照相馆, Shen Ao, 2025)

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“All you have to do is survive,” turncoat translator Guanghai (Wang Chuanjun) tells his conflicted mistress Yuxiu (Gao Ye) in trying to justify his decision to collaborate with the Japanese whom he assumes will end up winning this war and taking control of China’s future. Perhaps his strategy is understandable, even sensible in some ways, in allying himself with an invading force and using them for protection while trying to get his hands on exit visas for his wife, son ,and mistress too, but is this level of complicity really permissible given the unfolding atrocities all around him?

Released to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, Shen Ao’s gritty drama is inspired by the efforts to expose the horror of the Nanjing Massacre, though it was not actually exposed in the way the film implies. This might explain the strangeness of the English language title which is perhaps intended to signify that they have the Japanese bang to rights for the atrocities they committed because of the photo evidence which they themselves took. A young Japanese officer, Hideo Ito (Daichi Harashima), whom the film seems to imply is a descendant of Hirobumi Ito who was assassinated by Korean Independence activists in Harbin in 1909, is employed as a war photographer having apparently been given this position to keep him safe while fulfilling his elite family’s military duty. Ito appears in some ways conflicted but in others indifferent to the chaos around him. He cheerfully takes photographs of Japanese soldiers holding the heads of Chinese citizens they’ve beheaded or bayoneting babies, and is genuinely confused when his pictures come back marked “no good” because he thought they’d be good for encouraging morale rather than evidence of inhuman depravity that would dishonour his fellow countrymen. 

Neverheless, he baulks at the idea of killing anyone himself which is one reason he looks for an excuse not shoot Ah Chang (Liu Haoran), a postman caught in the street trying to flee the city. Noticing a photo album that fell out of his postbag, Ito asks him if he knows how to develop photographs. Chang nods to everything he says to save his own life and Ito makes him his personal developer. Of course, Chang doesn’t know anything about photography, but is unexpectedly saved first by Guanghai who realises he’s not who he says he is but says nothing, and then by the owner of the photo studio, Jin (Wang Xiao), who is hiding in the basement with his wife and two children. Chang develops the photos with Jin’s help, but becomes conflicted on discovering those of the atrocities in feeling as if by developing them he has become complicit in the Japanese’s crimes. 

Ito insists that he and Chang are “friends”. When the Japanese marched into the city, they said they’d abide by the Geneva Convention and surrendering soldiers would be treated kindly. They repeatedly state that it’s the Chinese who have spurned their “friendship” by resisting them, but the Japanese soldiers refer to the Chinese as pigs and dogs, raping, killing, and pillaging without a second thought. One of the women at Yuxiu’s theatre tries to flee but is caught and made into a comfort woman later losing her mind. Yuxiu too is raped by Japanese soldiers after being forced to sing Peking Opera for them, which they do not really appreciate, just as the soldiers other than Ito fail to recognise the value of traditional Chinese art. 

In what’s become a famous and potentially incendiary line, Chang eventually fires back that “we are not friends” and it’s true enough that the film is also, to some extent, indulging in a contemporary anti-Japanese sentiment which has already led to violence. The poster tagline reads “No Chinese person can ever forget”. Nevertheless, it largely avoids overt propaganda aside from some jabs at the KMT who fire on their own soldiers and featuring a large picture of Chiang Kai-shek who abandoned Nanjing which had been the capital, ceding it to the Japanese and retreating to Wuhan, until the second half of the film in which Jin flicks through the various backdrops he has of famous Chinese landmarks and Chang remarks “not one inch less” emphasising that in any era China will give no ground. The sentiment undoubtedly also applies to “lost” territories to which the Mainland thinks it has a claim such as Taiwan.

The act of photography thereby becomes a means of resistance in turning the images that Ito had intended to be pro-Japanese propaganda into those which will eventually damn them. Chang and Yuxiu are forced to pose with a dead baby murdered by a Japanese soldier as part of Ito’s staged photoshoot designed to disprove the earlier pictures in insisting that the Chinese population have welcomed the Japanese and are happy to be citizens of its empire, but discover their way of resisting in reversing the historical truth by keeping hold of the negatives. 

But Ito is perhaps, like Guanghai, caught out by his own naivety in failing to realise that allowing Chang to develop the photos has also made him a witness, so now he knows too much. Though he originally tries to protect him and insists they’re “friends”, Ito soon changes his tune on realising his mistake and that he could end up in trouble if his photos of the atrocities are leaked. Though the generals express distaste and instruct their officers to stop the soldiers rampaging, the local commander, Inoue, tells Ito that they must destroy China to take it which is why he lets the men do as they please in an attempt to break their spirit. But their spirit doesn’t break. Chang and the others continue to plot escape and the eventual exposure of the horrific acts committed by the Japanese in Nanjing. Technically accomplished and elegantly staged, Shen’s harrowing drama seems to say that the truth will out and that sooner or later there will be a reckoning in which all will have to answer for the choices they have made.

Trailer (simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Sister Street Fighter: Fifth Level Fist (女必殺五段拳, Shigehiro Ozawa, 1976)

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Though it’s tacked on to the Sister Street Fighter series, Level Five Fist (女必殺五段拳, Onna hissatsu godan ken) actually has nothing to do with it save borrowing a part of the title which is intended to signal the presence of its star. Thus, this is not really a martial arts movie but a much more conventional Toei action film in which the leading role is technically split between Etsuko Shihomi’s posh girl karate champ and Tsunehiko Watase’s sexist cop. It does however continue the smuggling theme with the drugs this time first being packed inside fish and then encased in Buddha statues to be exported to America.

Like many Toei films of the time, there is an underlying theme of anti-Americanism as the “Far East” big boss, posing as a Hollywood movie exec, is supposedly from there but has a strong accent suggesting otherwise. Meanwhile, the brother and sister at the film’s centre are a pair of children who were fathered by American servicemen at the bases in Okinawa who presumably took no responsibility for their upbringing. The brother’s father was black, while the sister’s was white, and though they have both suffered prejudice and discrimination because of their mixed ethnicity, it’s clear that Jim (Ken Wallace) has had it worse. Michi (Mitchi Love) makes good use of her native-level English abilities and martial arts skills to work as a bodyguard / interpreter for visiting dignitaries, but Jim seems to struggle to find employment and subsequently ends up working for a Korean gang run out of a local nightclub. 

The pair have a dream of saving up enough money to return to Okinawa, which was returned to Japan in 1971 after an extended period of US occupation, and opening a restaurant which the film positions as a desire to escape from the racism they experience on the mainland. When Jim says that Kiku (Etsuko Shihomi) is their only friend, he half implies that the discrimination they face is down to being Okinawan rather than their mixed ethnicity which would continue to be an issue even on the islands as it was in their childhood even if there may be more understanding given the continuing presence of the American military and larger numbers of mixed-ethnicity people. In any case, it’s true enough that even those from Okinawa do also experience discrimination on the mainland and are not always accepted as “Japanese” while their Okinawan identity is not respected either. 

Kiku is trying to protect her friends, but finds herself hamstrung by rigid cop Takagi (Tsunehiko Watase) who also happens to be the son of a friend of her father’s. Kiku’s father is apparently a self-made man and successful kimono merchant married to a more conservative woman with higher social ambitions. As the film opens, Kiku is dressed in a kimono and being subject to a formal omiai meeting for an arranged marriage with an admittedly promising candidate who graduated from an elite university and works for a prominent bank. But Kiku looks bored throughout and defiantly flouts social convention by suddenly claiming to have an appointment and walking out, much to her mother’s embarrassment. Her father lets her go and is apparently less bothered about this sort of propriety though later trying to put his foot down when she leaves the house dressed like a hippy rather than in a fine kimono which is not, after all, a very good advert for the family business. 

Her father also tries to set Kiku up with Takagi, but like her mother, Takagi also tells her to keep her nose out of the case and “try trusting a man for once”. He criticises her for saying that she doesn’t want to lose to a man and explains that men are attracted to women because of their “gentleness.” He adds that cooking and raising children are what make women happy, with the clear implication that Kiku is in the wrong for flouting conventional gender roles and should quickly conform by getting married and becoming a wife. Kiku appears to give him the benefit of the doubt and this confusion over gender roles is compounded when she poses as a boy and takes a job as a extra on the jidaigeki film set at the studio which turns out to be a front for drug runners. A queer-coded actor who is later told off for “stalking people again” tries to hit on her in a clear allusion to her masculinity. But unlike in the Sister Street Fighter films, she is ultimately defeated and tied to a log with a buzz saw coming at her only to be saved by the intervention of Takagi while the final scenes see her supporting him after he is (possibly fatally) injured defeating the bad guys.

All in all, it’s some rather confusing messaging but seems to come out on the side of male authority as represented by the police rather than Kiku’s father who is depicted as a weakened figure of masculinity owing to being henpecked by his wife and hoodwinked by his feisty daughter. Even the grinning sap from the gym who tried to put Chanel No. 5 on Kiku’s karate outfit, much to her annoyance, is later revealed to be an undercover cop. Which is all to say, that Kiku’s martial arts ability is almost a kind of joke and something that places her outside of conventional gender norms which should otherwise be “corrected” rather than praised, as it was in the Sister Streetfighter series which placed more emphasis on martial arts philosophy. Then again, the original trilogy ended on a similarly sour note in reaffirming Koyu’s maternity. It seems it’s less sisters doing it for themselves, than sisters doing as they’re told, which aside from anything else is a disappointing conclusion to one of the few female–led action franchises of the 1970s.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Return of Sister Street Fighter (帰って来た女必殺拳, Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1975)

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First it was drugs, then diamonds. This time, it’s gold. Even by this third and final, in the official trilogy at least, instalment in the Sister Street Fighter series, Return of the Sister Street Fighter (帰って来た女必殺拳, Kaette kita onna hissatsu ken) the gangsters still haven’t come up with a good way of smuggling. These ones have hit on the bright idea of dissolving gold in acid and importing it as if it were Chinese liquor. 

In any case, following the same pattern as the other two films, Return begins in Hong Kong with a friend of Koryu’s (Etsuko Shihomi) being murdered by thugs right after asking her to go to Japan and look for her cousin Shurei (Akane Kawasaki) who has gone missing leaving her little girl Rika (Chieko Onuki) behind. Hoping to track down her sister Reika in Yokohama, Koryu once again heads to Japan with Rika in tow only to discover that Shurei has been forced to become the mistress of the shadow boss of the Yokohama China Town, Oh Ryumei (Rinichi Yamamoto). 

Though the film maybe following a pattern, it’s also, in a sense, diverging in that it, perhaps uncomfortably, attempts shift Koryu into a more maternal space in essentially leaving her responsible for Rika because of all of her other relatives are for one reason or another unavailable. This is, after all, the implication of the closing scenes, that Koryu will be giving up her life of martial arts and fighting crime to look Rika. Even so, as we’ve seen throughout the trilogy, Koryu is not much good at protecting those around her. All of her friends and relatives generally end up dead, leaving the screenwriters having to make up more for the next instalment. Family is a liability for the sisters too, as Shuri and Reika try to save each other from the clutches of Oh, who once again tries to control them with drugs and familial bonds, but ultimately fail.

But then Oh is on a different level even to the admittedly eccentric villains of the first two films. He appears to use a wheelchair and dresses in a stereotypically Chinese outfit (as does Koryu, to be fair). Even his name is obviously Chinese even if uses the Japanese readings of the kanji which literally mean “King Dragon Bright”. Yet when he’s eventually unmasked, it seems that he was actually a member of the Kempeitai, or military police, in Manchuria during the war, where he committed atrocities against the Chinese people and finally stole bunch of gold bullion which has fuelled his post-war Chinatown empire. It’s likely also what sparked his obsession with all things gold. Even his prosthetic hand turns out to be made of it, ironically moulded into a grasping motion. 

Oh behaves like some kind of Roman Emperor, sitting on his Dias and holding gladiatorial contests to find new henchmen. He declares he that neither capitalism nor communism can beat gold and he’s hedging his bets on both in an ultimate bid for behind-the-scenes power. Embodying the toxic legacy of militarism, he mistakenly underestimates Koryu declaring that that’s what happens to people who depend too much on their physical abilities, thinking her to be dead. His weird henchmen include a man with a lewd-looking and infinitely symbolic snaking sword, but, of course, they’re no match for Koryu who once again discovers an unexpected ally at a critical moment. 

Even so, the film’s approach to it’s Chinese themes is very much of its time. Once again, it uses some offensively stereotypical music to introduce the Hong Kong setting, and the friend who went to Japan with Shurei is actually called “Suzie Wong”, as in “The World of”. The world surrounding Oh ought to be quite dark what with the constant presence of acid, the people trafficking, and the weird henchmen but somehow the film maintains its cheerful tone, no doubt bolstered by Koryu’s ability to take the gangsters down, even if her way of doing it isn’t all that efficient and more often than not gets all her friends killed. Nevertheless, this time around it seems she’s fighting for the sisterhood against the evil gangsters who control and abuse women, but even so, her final transition to mother-in-waiting feels a little like a rebuke, as if even little dragons have to cool their fire one day just as her brother in the first instalment had wanted her to settle down and live a “normal life” doing typically feminine things rather than mastering martial arts and shutting down the warped and amoral gangsters currently smuggling their greed and weirdness into a changing Japan.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Sister Street Fighter: Hanging by a Thread (女必殺拳　危機一, Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1974)

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Li Koryu (Etsuko Shihomi) returns to fight crime in Japan in the second in the Sister Street Fighter series, Hanging by a Thread (女必殺拳　危機一, Onna hissatsu ken: Kiki ippatsu). The first film apparently tested so well so that studio execs ordered a second one right away to fill a big New Year slot. That might in one sense explain why the film is pretty much the same in terms of narrative, yet this one does go a little further while swapping the drugs subplot for diamonds.

Koryu comes to the aid of a man being attacked by thugs in a Hong Kong marketplace and is somehow completely unfazed when he plucks out his false eye with instructions to give it to Professor Enmei (Hideaki Nagai) who is also known to Koryu because he’s the father of her old school friend, Birei (Hisako Tanaka). Unfortunately, the false eye contains microfilm that suggests Birei has been kidnapped by vicious Japanese gangsters. The professor therefore sends her to Tokyo on a rescue mission and we discover that she also has an older sister, Byakuren (Kanya Tsukasa), who was never mentioned in the earlier film, who is living in Japan having chased her dream of becoming a jewellery designer.

This time around, it’s diamonds not drugs, but the gangsters still haven’t cracked this smuggling business and have come up with the very weird idea of hiding them in the bum cheeks of attractive young women. Meanwhile, they also force the women into sex work. Osone’s (Hideo Murota) female business partner Mayumi, played by Madam Joy, a drag queen who starred in several Toei films in the mid-70s, films them from a distant window to get material for blackmail. Nevertheless, she only cares about the diamonds, unlike the boss and several of the gang which once again includes a rival martial arts outfit who have in it for the Shorinji temple. 

Shinichi Chiba does not appear in the film, but Koryu does gain a kind of sidekick in the form of Tsubaki (Yasuaki Kurata), a sleazy-looking guy whose intentions are permanently unclear. The film goes a little bit further with its awkward orientalism opening in a Hong Kong marketplace with some offensively stereotypical music and a bunch of fire crackers, even if once again in trends in the opposite direction from most films of the time in that the crooks are all Japanese and it’s a half-Chinese woman who’s coming to sort them all out. The gangsters have apparently been trafficking the women abroad for sex work, then bringing them back with the diamonds in their bums which seems like a plan with a lot of potential problems even if they hadn’t made the huge mistake of kidnapping a friend of Koryu and then later her sister. 

But then again, Koryu’s cases seem to be fairly isolated. Once she takes out these bad guys, that’s it. There’s no wider conspiracy save a general sense that the world itself is corrupt and indifferent to human suffering. Osone has a strange love of taking people’s eyes, which might be a way to stop them seeing who he really is. He has, after all, already taken the stars from Byakuren’s along with her dreams of a new life in Japan finally becoming the jewellery designer she always dreamed of being. Despite her determination to save her sister, Byakuren soon realises that Osone is most definitely not a man of his word. His curiously old-fashioned outfits and demeanour suggest he’s seeking a place with the elites of an earlier time while indulging in some fairly odd behaviour. 

Once again, Koryu squares off against his equally weird henchmen who start attacking her the moment she lands in Japan, and eventually ends up stabbing someone with the severed arm of another enemy still holding his knife. Still, the tone is generally cheerful and upbeat despite the strangeness of the tale and series of losses Koryu experiences including a challenge to her pride when she’s bested by one of the martial arts goons. In this continually uncertain and increasingly surreal world, Koryu’s fists, it seems, are one of the few things that can absolutely be relied upon along with evil smugglers and their bizarre new plans for circumventing the law of the land out of nothing other than lust and greed.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Sister Street Fighter (女必殺拳, Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1974)

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As the Japanese cinema industry continued to decline in the face of competition from television, there was perhaps paradoxically more space available for small-scale genre films. Shinichi Chiba had ushered in a new age of unarmed combat with his Bodyguard Kiba karate movies. The Street Fighter series followed hot on its heels and was enough of a hit for the studio to take notice. They suggested a new spin-off line that would feature a female action star with Chiba appearing in a supporting role and so Sister Street Fighter (女必殺拳, Onna hissatsu ken) was born.

Producers apparently first wanted Taiwanese-born Hong Kong actress Angela Mao who had starred with Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon by which the film is clearly influenced. Angela Mao was, however, unavailable, which is what led them to take a chance on Chiba’s then 18-year-old protégé Etsuko Shihomi. Shihomi had joined his Japan Action Club out of high school to study stunts, martial arts, and gymnastics and had only limited acting experience but soon proved up to the challenge of carrying a movie as a female action lead. 

Koryu is the sister of a martial arts champion who has gone missing in Japan. She then finds out from his boss that he was actually an undercover narcotics agent trying to break a Japanese drug ring. As Koryu’s mother was Japanese and she still has family in Yokohama, the police inspector thinks she’d be a perfect fit to head out there, find out what’s happened to her brother Mansei (Hiroshi Miyauchi), and maybe take out the drug dealers too. 

In some ways, it’s an interesting subversion of the Sinophobia often found in Japanese films of this era that this time it’s a half-Chinese woman squaring off against Japanese drug dealers. Her brother was apparently so upset about not being able to stop the drugs flooding Japan that he decided to do something reckless that directly led to his disappearance. The Hong Kong police also have a second operative, a woman, working inside the gang but have lost contact with her. In contrast to Koryu, Fang Shing (Xie Xiu-rong) has been sent in as a classic honey trap to use her femininity as a weapon by becoming the boss’ mistress to get the lowdown on the gang. But as a consequence, Fang Shing has also become addicted to drugs which the boss uses as a means to control her. 

Koryu, by contrast, immediately stands up against male patriarchal control by beating up a bunch of guys that were trying to hassle her in a bar. Nevertheless, Mansei’s martial arts master says that her brother was hoping she’d get married and have a “normal life”, which does seem like quite a chauvinistic thing to say and especially to the martial arts-obsessed Koryu. Even so, he introduces her to another young woman, Emi, who got into Shorinji Kempo when Mansei saved her from being raped. These skills do after all give them the means to defend themselves against an often hostile and violent society along with granting them a greater independence than they might otherwise have.

Still, there are a selection of strange villains on show with death by blowgun and ex-priests along with the Amazon Seven team of Thai kickboxers and “Eva Parrish”, apparently the karate champion of the Southern Hemisphere. The action is quite obviously influenced by Hong Kong kung fu films and most particularly Enter the Dragon, though to a lesser extent Shaw Brothers in the warring schools subplot that sees the Shorinji Kempo love is power philosophy challenged by the gang’s very own martial artist, who feels he must wipe them out to overcome his humiliation in being defeated. Nevertheless, Koryu effortlessly takes out the bad guys as she battles her way towards saving her brother, whom the gang have started experimenting on in an effort to acquire more complex data about tolerance and safe levels for consumption of drugs. The bad guys have a full on lab in their basement where they’ve come up with an innovative solution to the smuggling issue by using wigs! It’s all quite surreal and cartoonish even when it starts getting grim, but rest assured Koryu is here to sort it all out, and sort it out she will.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

No Other Choice (어쩔수가없다, Park Chan-wook, 2025)

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Most of the time, when someone says they had no choice, they’re paradoxically admitting that they had one, but they expect to understand the choice they’ve made because we would have done the same or can’t reasonably expect them to accept the consequences of the alternative. “No other choice,” on the other hand, is self-contradictory, clearly stating that a choice does indeed exist. Perhaps that’s why it seems so irritatingly disingenuous every time it’s said to Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), even if he eventually succumbs to its self-absolving qualities.

In any case, it’s this sense of powerlessness that’s at the centre of Park Chan-wook’s satirical drama as a middle-aged man finds himself suddenly exiled from the upper-middle-class lifestyle he’s worked so hard to build for himself when his company’s taken over by an American firm who have “no other choice” than to shed some staff. Man-su is blindsided by this corporate betrayal, attending self-help sessions that remind him there’s no such thing as jobs for life any more. Losing his job wasn’t his choice, but in some ways perhaps that makes it worse. 

What connects him with the other men in his position is that he’s obsessed with getting another job in the paper industry rather than exploring other options. All of these men are fixated on getting back what they feel has been taken from them. Not only is Man-su dead set on getting another job in paper, but on holding on to the family home from which he was displaced as a child and has only just managed to reclaim. To that extent, what he wants is a return to a past that doesn’t quite exist any more or exists only in his memory and is therefore unattainable.

Losing his job also leaves him displaced within his family as his sudden inability to keep them in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed eats away at his sense of masculinity. They’ve already had to exile the dogs, leaving his young daughter distraught, while his wife, Miri (Son Ye-jin), has started working again, further emphasising his failure as a provider. Witnessing one of the other men’s wives cheating on him with a much younger lover, Man-su too begins to fear that his wife no longer sees him as a man and will cheat on him too with someone who better fulfils the codes of masculinity. Yet it’s his stubborn male pride that undermines his positions much more than the unfortunate fact of having lost his job, which wasn’t after all something he had much control over. The wives are all much more pragmatic and come up with realistic solutions such as ruthless belt tightening and ceding a little ground by voluntarily giving up anything inessentials while encouraging their husbands to be a little more pragmatic and consider new directions rather stubbornly fixating on reclaiming the life they had before. 

That might be Miri decides to just sort of go with it even after beginning to suspect that Man-su has something to do with the disappearance of his rivals. At least he’s being proactive, even if it’s not really the best way to go about it, and by burying a few bodies there, he’s basically made it impossible to sell the house which is one goal achieved. It’s not losing your job that’s the problem, it’s how you deal with it, one of the other men’s wives insists as even Man-su ironically berates him for not listening to any of his wife’s “sensible” suggestions. Then again, the fact Man-su is eventually offered a job training AI replace him invites the suggestion that he’s basically killing all the other workers in the hope of clinging on to the wheel as soon as possible. The managers state they had “no other choice” about that too, and are grinning with the blinkered vision that prevents them from realising there’ll be no need for managers when there’s no one manage. 

In any case, the fact that Man-su walks around for with toothache for a significant amount of time echoes the hero of Aimless Bullet and suggests that perhaps things aren’t all that much different in the Korea of today caught between deepening wealth inequality, exploitative working conditions, and employment precarity presented by the rise of AI and increasingly globalisation. There is something quite sad about the devaluing of these skills in that what Man-su and the other men share is reverence for paper, the beauty and texture of it, along with the craftsmanship and pride in their work that now seems to belong to a bygone era. It seems that the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism leaves Man-su with “no other choice” than to do what he did and leave others with no other choice but him, but all he’s really done is seal his own fate in a futile attempt to hold on to a past that is rapidly slipping away.

No Other Choice screens as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Useful Ghost (ผีใช้ได้ค่ะ, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, 2025)

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Right at the beginning of Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost (ผีใช้ได้ค่ะ, Phi Chaidai Kha), we see a man creating a classical-style relief that’s positioned in a tranquil spot surrounded by nature. It features people from all walks of life, a mother and her child, a monk, a scholar, a soldier, a labourer and so on, as well as a goat, and is later revealed to have the title “democracy monument”. But as soon as it’s put up, it’s brought violently down as developers move in to replace this oasis of peace with a modern shopping mall. 

The construction gives rise to more “dust” which is what’s polluting the country, directly linking rampant capitalism with the erosion of democracy. Even the home lived by the self-proclaimed “Academic Ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan) may one day be consumed as the traditional streets are replaced by yet more upscale shopping opportunities. In an effort to get rid of the dust that’s plaguing him, he buys a vacuum cleaner, but it turns out to be haunted and coughs in the middle of the night, spitting out all the dust he made it swallow. 

“Dust” is also a term that’s come to stand in for those exploited by this increasingly capitalistic society whose lives are afforded little value, such as factory worker Tok who died after being exposed to too much dust while working at a factory producing vacuum cleaners. Meanwhile, the factory owner’s son has just lost his pregnant wife, Nat (Davika Hoorne), to a respiratory illness caused by dust. Nat has also possessed a vacuum cleaner and reunites with her broken-hearted husband, March (Witsarut Himmarat), but finds herself increasingly compromised after sucking some of the dust out of a government minister’s eyes.

Nat’s desire to stay in the mortal realm longer than is proper is reminiscent of the classic ghost Nang Nak, but what she also becomes is a kind of class traitor increasingly involved with the oppressive regime and betraying her own people to ensure her personal survival. Government minister Dr Paul gets her in on his programme chasing ghosts through dreams and banishing them from people’s memories in order to erase their existence and history. When people refuse to give up their ghosts, he has them given electroshock therapy so that they forget them, as he once tried to do to March before Nat made herself useful to him. And so “dust” and “ghosts” have now become metaphors for those who resist as the souls killed not only during the 2010 massacre but Thammasat University massacre in 1976 rise again to make their presence felt. 

According to the Academic Ladyboy, that these ghosts came back at all is itself an act of resistance, as if these memories themselves could become reminders that resistance is possible and things weren’t always this way. He loathes Nat for the choices that she made in turning on her own, but she was also facing other kinds of oppression in never being accepted by her husband’s upperclass family who in themselves become a symbol of autocratic elitism. Her mother-in-law, Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), who owns the factory and is unsympathetic towards Tok insisting his death was nothing to do with the working environment, submits herself to them too because like Nat she didn’t belong either and felt she had no other choice. Her eldest child Moss was taken away from her because she spoke a Northern dialect and they feared the child wouldn’t learn standard Thai. Now she tries to talk to her son’s Australian husband in Teochew, only for Moss to roll his eyes and say no one knows how to speak that outside Thailand. Just as they rejected Nat for being an outsider, they rejected Moss for being gay until he became useful to them.

The longer Nat stays beyond her allotted time, the more it corrupts her so on restoring her corporality she would betray even March, who has come to sympathise with the ghosts, in order to be allowed to stay and maintain her position. She’s the “useful ghost”, from a certain point a view, but from another, all the others are “useful” too in keeping the spirit of resistance alive. Quirky and surreal with its tales of haunted hoovers, obsessive bureaucracy, and factories where singing is randomly banned, not to mention truly awesome shoulder pads, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s deadpan absurdist drama is deadly serious where it counts right until its intensely cathartic conclusion.

A Useful Ghost screens as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The World of Love (세계의 주인, Yoon Ga-eun, 2025)

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Lee Jooin (Seo Su-bin) is a cheerful young woman, always laughing and joking. She tells people she’s okay, though some of them think she shouldn’t be, as if she can’t be telling the truth or what happened to her can’t be all that bad if she’s otherwise unaffected by it now. It’s like they’re telling her that she has no right to be happy, but must continue to live in suffering to conform to their idea of what a traumatised person looks like, otherwise she must be making it up for attention. 

Put like that, it seems very unfair. But it’s true enough that director Yoon Ga-eun plays with our prejudices deliberately withholding whatever it is that happened in Jooin’s life until the truth of it gently unfolds and we witness the radiating effects it’s had on her family and those around her. We at first wonder if she might have done something bad she’s expected to atone for, especially with the talk of lawyers and court cases, the fact her friends and teachers seem to regard her as a compulsive liar, and her sometimes aggressive physicality that sees her rough house with the boys and repeatedly end up in altercations with classmate Su-ho (Kim Jeong-sik) whose sister Noori attends her mother’s daycare.

Later, we might wonder if Su-ho is carrying something difficult to bear too. His mother doesn’t seem to be around, and he’s stepped into a maternal role caring for his sister to a degree that may seem obsessive. He’s started a petition against a convicted child abuser being released back into their community and is fixated on getting the entire school to sign it, even though it’s not really anything to do with him and simply saying they don’t want him back here is not particularly helpful seeing as he’ll have to go somewhere. Su-ho thinks he’s doing a good thing, but Jooin refuses to sign because she doesn’t like it that he’s written that being a victim of sexual assault ruins people’s lives. She tries to explain to him why it’s offensive, that he’s robbing those who’ve experienced sexual violence of the right to assume agency and suggesting they must forever be defined by their victimhood. She resents his patriarchal attitude and insistence that someone’s life could be “ruined” beyond repair because of a traumatic event that occurred to them personally outside of the problematic framing Su-ho’s way of thinking lends it. Su-ho, however, does not really listen but merely forces her to sign the petition anyway to fit in with everyone else so he’ll get his unanimous numbers, not that it really matters. 

We might also start seeing some of Jooin’s behaviour as a trauma response. Her love of Taekwondo a means of self-protection, her prankster persona a way of rebelling against her sadness with aggressive cheerfulness, but in that we may not be much better than Su-ho. Perhaps she just likes Taekwondo and is a natural comedienne. Maybe she just doesn’t care for apples. Not everything in her life radiates from her trauma. Meanwhile, we catch sight of things in others that suggest they may be suffering too. When Jooin grabs her friend Yura’s arm, she pulls away as if it were injured, tugging at her sleeve as if trying to hide it. Someone keeps writing nasty notes questioning Jooin’s behaviour, which they find confusing, and her authenticity as if she might simply be playacting something which to them is real.

Not being believed is another aspect of Jooin’s trauma. Even when she tells the truth, others accuse her of lying. Other women around her experience something similar, asked why they accepted money from or did not cut of contact with a man they say abused them even if that man was a close family member. Jooin’s father has abandoned the family and does not reply to her messages, rejecting her because of his own sense of guilt, while her mother is doing the best she can but has taken to drink. She also has a younger brother, Hae-in, with a burgeoning career as a stage magician, who may at times get forgotten amid everyone else’s needs. As part of his act, he has a section where he asks the audience to write their fears and worries on a card so he can magic them all away. But as much as he’s been secretly protecting his sister, there’s no spell you can cast to make all of this disappear. Jooin, meanwhile, writes her vocation as “love” and is indeed surrounded by it. “You’ll never know who I am, but I’ll never forget you,” the note writer later signs off, thanking her for speaking out and making them feel a little less alone while simultaneously liberating Jooin from her sense of fear and isolation. “Lying makes it hurt more,” little Noori advises Jooin’s mother, while Jooin has at least unburdened herself and assumed control of the world around her.

The World of Love screens as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)