Tag: 2020s

The Distributors (유포자들, Hong Seok-ku, 2022)

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When Yu-bin (Park Sung-hoon) finds himself being blackmailed after being drugged in a club and videoed by an attractive young woman, he can’t help but feel hard done by. A teacher who once aspired to making films, he’s on the verge of marrying his fiancée Sun-ae (Kim So-eun) who is from an incredibly wealthy and very conservative pro-Japanese family, but if any of this gets out he can kiss his comfortable life goodbye. His focus is not, however, on how he shouldn’t have gone to his friend’s night club after promising Sun-ae he wouldn’t, but how he can cover all this up so she doesn’t find out he took two girls back to their flat when she was away on a business trip.

Hong Seok-ku’s The Distributors (유포자들, Yoopojadeul) never quite keys in to the fact that its hero’s a bit of a slimeball who nevertheless thinks he’s a good guy, and more often than not falls into his hard done by mindset. This might, however, echo the perspective of the average man in a society in which illicit photography has become a hot-button issue. As the film opens, Yu-bin is inflicting corporal punishment on two boys who’ve been caught taking inappropriate videos of women, which is perhaps not the best way to deal with this issue. Though he emphasises that they’ve done wrong, he’s also sort of on their side in that he agrees not to take this any further in case it damages their futures. Ji-ho, in particular, is on track to get into Seoul University and Yu-bin can’t really work out why he might have done something like this. The other boy Seong-min, happens to be his fiancée’s younger brother and predictably blames everything on Ji-ho.

It is then quite ironic that Yu-bin finds himself a victim of a video taken without his consent that shows him in a compromising position. Seven years earlier, he’d been accused of posting revenge porn after a former girlfriend broke up with him and had to pay her legal compensation. He claims that he didn’t intentionally leak it, but that his friend Sang-beom (Song Jin-woo) found it on his computer and uploaded it to the internet to make money on amateur porn sites. But again, his focus is more on how to make this go away rather than the harm he may have caused to Ga-young. She tells him that her life’s been ruined and that it’s pure hell to feel as if everyone’s looking at you wondering if they’ve seen the video. He, however, offers her money and suggests they settle this “like civilised people”, which is in itself not so different from blackmail while suggesting that she’s being unreasonable in not letting the matter drop.

Meanwhile, what Yu-bin might actually be worried about is that he’s made a tape of him and Sun-ae that she may not even know about or have consented to. In any case, his carelessness has meant that this video too might end up online ruining her life in the same way as Ga-young’s while the consequences for him are only mild humiliation and the breaking of his engagement. It’s not exactly clear how he and Sun-ae ended up meeting, but there’s a mild implication that he’s only really with her for the luxury lifestyle she provides while her father, who objects to the marriage because Yu-bin is not of their social class, also offers him career advancement in sponsoring a film department at the school. 

The blackmailer, Yu-bin, and his friend Sang-beom all make ironic references to this being like a Hitchcock movie, though Yu-bin is not really a “wrong man” so much as one running away from his own cowardice and imperfections. In his film class, he shows the children Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid, which is certainly an ironic choice given that it ends with a direct message warning men of the dangers of adultery and to always remember their duties to their family as husbands and fathers. Even Yu-bin’s sadly looking out through a rainy window echoes Kim’s cinematography, though Yu-bin is still in the mindset of feeling sorry for himself rather than coming to the realisation that even if it’s not Ga-young who is punishing him, he has never really faced his role in what happened to her or accepted responsibility for his failure to safeguard her privacy. Only now, when it’s him, does he begin to understand not only that he’s been selfish but that he’s failed in his role as a teacher by not figuring out what was going on with the boys and the videos while focussing on protecting their futures rather than those of the young women around them who deserve safety and respect but are provided little of either by a male-dominated society.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Butcher’s Blade (手遮天, Liu Wenpu, 2026)

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Laws are meaningless if no one’s prepared to enforce them. According to the opening titles of The Butcher’s Blade (手遮天, shǒu zhē tiān), the Song had a complicated criminal code with lots of rules to be followed. However, in the real world, they only really apply to certain people. Xue Buyi (Liu Fengchao) has been a constable for 10 years but has become a bitter, broken man who feels himself to be a coward for remaining complicit with this corrupt regime.

A courtesan reports the local coffin maker for rape and violence having slashed her face and thereby not just physically and psychologically harmed her, but destroyed her livelihood. The courtesans complain they’ve reported him before and that no one helps them because they’re not the sort of people who matter in this world. Buyi announces he’ll get them justice and does indeed arrest the coffin maker, but the villagers then turn against him. The coffin maker is well connected and Buyi’s boss lets him go. The courtesans are unsurprised but disappointed, while Buyi’s self-loathing only deepens. His pride and masculinity are further eroded when he tries to help a woman selling noodles that he’s fond of fend off an exploitative landlord who’s been upping the rent in an attempt to coerce her into a sexual relationship. Wei simply asks him for the money instead, but Buyi has nary a penny to his name. Deliberately humiliating him, Wei makes Buyi drink flasks of soy sauce in exchange for reducing Erniang’s (Gao Weiman) debt which Buyi does until Erniang puts a stop to it.

Given all that, it’s easy to see why he might turn to the dark side and allow this world to remake him in its image. The war inside him is between his upbringing as a pupil of Eagle Hall, a brutal police training facility designed to churn out thugs who heartlessly carry out the will of the powers that be, and his natural compassion which baulks at the brutal torture and murder expected of him as a law enforcement official. Buyi is directly contrasted with former colleague Li Zhen (Yuan Fufu) who is keen to get him back on side and working for Eagle Hall, while Buyi struggles with himself over the degree of moral comprise he’s comfortable accepting to be one of Huang’s elite policemen. By remaining complicit, he hopes he can get the money to save Erniang’s noodle stall and protect her from Wei, but she quite obviously can’t stand what Buyi is becoming and didn’t envisage having brutal policemen as her main clientele.

There seems to be a subversive allusion to the present day in the world that surrounds Buyi which is filled with corrupt officials and supported by a rotten regime that policemen like him prop up with thuggish authoritarianism, serving the interests of the powerful over those of the people. Buyi finds himself at the centre of conspiracy when he takes a job guarding government funds intended for disaster relief in the hope of getting extra money to help Erniang only to be accused of robbing the place himself. Recruited by former mentor Huang (Chunyu Shanshan), he witnesses his indifference to the disaster victims who have largely fallen into exploitation at the hands of corrupt landowner Wei. Huang plans to sacrifice them for his own personal gain by framing them as a revolutionary army led by a rival official seeking to overturn the regime which he will then heroically surpress. 

Buyi, however, has to decide whether he can really continue going along with all this or rise up to resist it. Liu Wenpu frames Buyi’s intervention in heroic terms in which he’s surrounded by an eerie blue glow and the sound of firecrackers as he finally decides that he can’t let people like Huang continue with their authoritarianism and indifference towards the welfare of the people. His rebellion, however, seems to make himself something of an outlaw condemned to a life of wandering while ultimately pointless. Huang was just one many and now others are trying to use his fate as a means of advancing their own position. The elegantly choreographed fight scenes take on a symbolic quality as Buyi progresses towards his showdown with Huang while battling himself and his inner conflict, torn between the what it takes to succeed in a world as corrupt as this and his essential humanity before finally coming down on the side of justice for all rather than continuing to serve the interests of an exploitative elite.

The Butcher’s Blade is released on Digital in the US on May 4 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Y Vân: The Lost Sounds of Saigon (Khoa Hà & Victor Velle, 2025)

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How can it be that someone can be universally renowned, famous beyond their wildest dreams, but seemingly forgotten only fifty years later? Filmmaker Khoa Hà moved to the US at 17 and never met the grandfather who passed away before she was born leaving behind a forgotten musical legacy. Other family members have told her various things about him, but the one that fascinated her was that Y Vân had been one of the foremost composers before the war through none of his work apparently survives.

Y Vân: The Lost Sounds of Saigon is partly a mystery as Khoa decides to try retracing her grandfather’s steps, trying to bring his music back into the modern era. But it’s also an exploration of family, legacy, and the brutality of the war during which most of Y Vân’s work was either deliberately or otherwise destroyed. Not only does Khoa struggle to find anything of her grandfather’s music, but is repeatedly told that nothing much survives of music made before 1975 due wartime destruction and/or the new regime who destroyed anything they deemed to be decadent. 

The totality of the destruction seems shocking. That an entire era could just be erased as if it never existed is somehow chilling in its implications. Y Vân was one of a handful of major songwriters whose work was known by all. In those days, publishers sold sheet music for songs on a similar level to records so people could learn the song by following as they listened, and you’d think that something like this would stick in the collective memory as people keep the songs alive by singing them. The problem is, however, that without any of Y Vân’s records, Koha isn’t left with much to go on, not really knowing who any of her father’s collaborators might have been to try asking them for their thoughts and recollections. 

All she really has to rely on is family, though Y Vân himself had said that’s all you really need. Looking for her grandfather’s legacy enables Khoa to reconnect with her family in Vietnam including her great-aunt and uncle as well as Y Vân’s first wife from whom he eventually separated. After a while, he mother joins her on her quest, deepening their own connection as they delve into family history and travel all over Vietnam trying to track down Y Vân’s music.

It’s a family connection that eventually puts them on to a collector who, like Khoa, has been trying to reclaim something of the past. Before the war, his family owned a music cafe, and so he’s been collecting records to recreate his childhood. His desire to restore this lost past is a means of trying to heal the trauma of the war and push past this dividing line to reclaim the lost Vietnam that lies behind it just as Khoa is attempting to reconnect with the cultural roots she felt herself in danger of losing in the US. 

Y Vân himself seems to have been a casualty of these changing times. He was temporarily sent for re-education and prevented from using his stage him with the consequence that he gave up writing music while many of his songs were banned. He passed away at a comparatively young age with his musical legacy all but forgotten. The singers who performed his music went to the US where they were unable to continue their singing careers and had to focus on making new lives for themselves. Through uncovering and archiving her grandfather’s music with the help of the collector who agrees to help her digitise his tapes and LPs so that everyone can hear them, Khoa is helping to preserve this history for future generations. As she says, art has the ability to heal old wounds and bring people together, enabling her to reconnect with her family and restore something of what was lost. Told with true visual flair, the film’s soundtrack mainly uses 60s covers of American songs, while animated sequences help to recreate the pre-war society in which Y Vân became famous, though ironically his actual dream was to study maths rather than becoming a musical superstar. Chapter markers see Khoa walking through a desert searching for Y Vân’s music and eventually finding her way toward accepting herself and culture through the preservation of her grandfather’s legacy.

Y Vân: The Lost Sounds of Saigon screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

The Road to Sydney (Benito Bautista, 2025)

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As a young person in Palawan, Sydney Loyola found herself the victim of toxic masculinity and a fiercely patriarchal culture. She recalls that her father once made her fight a neighbour’s son and threw her into a lake in what she then felt to be a rejection of her femininity. This feeling of being unloved by her father and responsible for the breakdown of her parents’ marriage has left a permanent scar on her life that continues to haunt her even as she begins the steps towards embracing her authentic self.

Shot over several years, Benito Bautista’s documentary follows Sydney through her transition having moved to the United States where she encounters a different kind of rejection and discrimination. A dancer and choreographer well versed in the traditional dance of Palawan, Sydney nevertheless had a survival job in San Francisco working for a property management company. When she told her boss that she needed medical leave to recover from surgery and that, on her return, she would be known as Sydney, he was apparently supportive. When she returned to work, however, the situation was quite different and her employers seemed to seize on any chance to dismiss her. Despite having sought advice from former fire fighter Mia who had undergone a successful transition in the fire service and assured Sydney that transgender people already enjoyed workplace protections in San Francisco she is eventually let from her job, forcing her to move out of her apartment, too.

But in another way, being forced out of her apartment is only another migration that acts as a fresh start at the beginning of her new life as Sydney. On reconnecting with her dance background, Sydney returns to the Philippines to choreograph a new routine inspired by a local folksong about a man who swore he would return for a woman. Sydney has done something quite similar, returning to reclaim not only her authentic self but her culture as rooted in the history of Palawan by choreographing a routine that incorporates traditional elements and western-inspired dance. Performed on the shores of a local beach, hers is a dance of migration inspired by the nomadic Batak people that reflects her journey toward becoming Sydney, embracing her authentic self, and eventually coming home.

Even in the US, Sydney had said that dance was the only place she felt truly safe while those who remember her from her youth in Palawan state that she was already able to express her authentic self even if she was too afraid of her parents’ reaction to do so openly. She recalls that she repressed herself and did everything she could not to stand out and be noticed, though the other children at school called her effeminate and bullied her. Even as an adult, she breaks down in tears wondering why people look down on others. Several of the other interviewees, some of whom are also from the Philippines, recall similar stories of being rejected by their families for not conforming to rigid gender roles.

Sydney says that she never felt loved by her father and suspects that his rejection of her was born of a feeling of inadequacy, that her femininity brought his own manhood into question. On reuniting with him, it seems as if her feelings toward her father may have been due to a lifelong misunderstanding, or at least, he doesn’t seem to remember her childhood in the same way she does and though the meeting is more of a positive experience than she feared it might be, she’s left feeling shortchanged for a lack of acknowledgment for all she suffered. Though she describes her mother as more supportive, Sydney also waited until after she died to pursue her transition fearing that it should be too difficult or her understand and cause further strain near the end of her life. Despite having gone to America to be free of this patriarchal culture, coming back to Palawan allows Sydney to come full circle by reclaiming her authentic identity and overcoming a past sense of rejection. Resolving her situation in the US and rediscovering old friends in Palawan, she finally arrives at herself and a moment of serenity having become the person she always knew herself to be.

The Road to Sydney screenedas part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers (旅と日々, Sho Miyake, 2025)

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A young woman in flight from the city asks what if you could go on a journey and never return, start again in another place pretending to be someone else or perhaps truly be reborn? Her suggestion may hint a desire to escape oneself in travel, as if it were possible to leave unpleasant things behind and become an idealised version of oneself somewhere where no one knows you. Inspired by two manga stories by Yoshiharu Tsuge, Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers (旅と日々, Tabi to Hibi), isn’t really so concerned with whether that is actually possible, but with the idea of travel as a means of liberation as the writer heroine struggles to free herself from “a cage of words” and somehow move beyond language.

Li (Shim Eun-kyung) writes in her native Korean which takes on a poetic quality at odds with the way she expresses herself verbally in Japanese which tends to be plainer, though warm and curious despite her outward shyness. She opens her screenplay with a woman waking up in a car “at a dead end” which is where she may feel herself be, though her isolation is echoed at a scene at a beach in which an Italian photography student tries to get a reserved Japanese man (Mansaku Takada) to pose naturally, taking off his sunglasses as if in an attempt to unmask him. He obviously can’t understand anything she’s saying, though the woman doesn’t seem bothered by it, and soon leaves the beach feeling uncomfortable to have been looked at in this way without much in the way of reciprocity.

A returned gaze might be what he finds in Nagisa (Yumi Kawai), a young woman on an impromptu island holiday trying to get away from something in the city. A professor at a screening of Li’s film describes it as sensual and erotic, which seems to confuse Li and perhaps hints at the ways he sees himself in it rather than what might have been intended. Another student, meanwhile, is moved by its depiction of loneliness and the impossibility of communication. Though set in the summer on a southern island, the scene is shot in blues that express the melancholy of the young couple who share a poignant connection that’s destined to end in sadness as Nagisa will soon return home. The final scene, set amid a typhoon, then becomes desperate and ominous despite its seeming serenity as Nagisa urges Natsuo to swim out further in the hope seeing fish with the suggestion that she is pushing him toward his death.

Benzo (Shinichi Tsutsumi), a gruff old man Li ends up staying with on an impromptu trip of her own only this time to snow country, echoing the famous novel as her train leaves the tunnel into a snowy landscape, says that he measures a piece of art on how well it depicts human sadness, which is something Li perhaps tried to do with her screenplay even if she says that her thoughts on seeing the film were that she has no talent. She tries to come up with something more organic inspired by the surroundings at Benzo’s mountain lodge, only to feel guilty and that perhaps she’s intruded on a private sorrow he may not actually have wanted to share despite suggesting she base her screenplay on her stay in an attempt to drum up business. Nevertheless, she strikes up an odd friendship with him and tagging along on his mission to steal a carp from a pond that turns out to belong to his ex-wife’s family as a kind of petty revenge.

Like Nagisa, she too will soon be moving on, to a new place to discover more of herself. While others make meta comments about the nature of drama, it may be that through the gift of a camera Li learns to look outward and gains an excuse for travel that takes her away from the introspection of her writing. As Natsuo had said, too much time to think can make you depressed, and though the stories she writes are sad rather than scary, as Nagisa had described Natsuo’s grim anecdote, they have an underlying darkness and sense of despair. Nevertheless, while the idyllic beachside setting of the summer segment may seem unusually chilly, Miyake finds warmth in snowy vistas of northern Japan which are, in their own way, a kind of blank canvas or a story waiting to be written by a traveller in search connection with oneself and the world.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers opens at New York’s Metrograph on April 24 with a limited nationwide rollout to follow.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Diamond Diplomacy (Yuriko Gamo Romer, 2025)

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Perhaps it’s strange to think of a sport as a national pastime, given that many transcend borders with global networks and shared histories that span centuries. Yet American-born sports are largely played only in America and perhaps it’s the relatively small scale of their most successful export, baseball, that makes it such a rich source of cultural exchange. There might therefore be a mild contradiction that both the US and Japan think of baseball as a national game as if it could belong only to one, though they don’t so much tussle for the soul of the sport as bounce it back and forth in a continual process of exchange. 

Yuriko Gamo Romer’s documentary Diamond Diplomacy explores the way in which baseball has fostered a relationship between the two nations that has survived severe strain. As a historian points out, baseball predates judo in Japan and became a symbol of its modernisation during the Meiji era. As soon as they began to play, Japan was beating the Americans at their own game as teams of schoolboys triumphed over elite squads from local warships leaving the sailors with a degree of wounded pride to have lost at a game they created. 

A video montage likens the equipment worn by the catcher to that worn by kendo players with its chest armour and grilled visor, while other interviewees wonder if it doesn’t play into a cultural mindset in which the individual sublimates themselves into a collective and commits themselves to a higher goal as a member of a team. Others describe it as Japan’s first purely recreational sport and suggest that it adopted samurai traits and martial arts philosophy which gave it a seriousness and a rigour that was at odds with the way the game was played in the US. American players who later came to play in Japan report consternation with the training regime, explaining that in general they only practised for a couple of hours before hitting the golf course while Japanese players trained 10 hours a day. This intensity may have contributed to the team spirit, but also, according to some, reflects a fundamental difference in cultural philosophies, While American players believe one is born with talent and can sharpen it only to a certain extent, in Japan they believe that it’s hard work that produces results and the more you train the better you can get regardless of innate talent.

Nevertheless, according the documentary, Japanese baseball fans continue to look up to the American leagues and it was the process of bringing over top stars such as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig during the 1930s that fostered a sense of connection between the two nations. These sporting relationships became a way of staving off conflict and brokering peace, though endured even once war had broken out. Internees in America describe finding hope and purpose in self-built diamonds, while the resurgence of baseball also contributed to the post-war recovery and a restored sense of national pride. In America, however, Japanese players were prevented from joining the major leagues and faced discrimination until Mashi Murakami was signed to play in the US in the mid-1960s. No other Japanese players were allowed to go play in America until Hideo Nomo exploited a loophole by retiring to accept a transfer only to be viewed as a traitor in Japan.

Nevertheless, the nation soon came round and Nomo’s games were later broadcast live on television making him a national hero. The film positions Ichiro Suzuki and Shohei Ohtani as the inheritors of this legacy, continuing the cross-cultural interplay between the two nations into the present day. An interviewee charts changing attitudes to the US and finds a correlation between the presence of Japanese players in America, suggesting that they fell to their lowest in the post-war period during the economic conflicts of the 1980s in which the US feared the newly dominant force of Japan in the bubble era, but improving with the arrival of Japanese players in US leagues in the lost decade of the ‘90s. Baseball continues to be a more isolated sport than some with each nation mainly focussed on their domestic game with no formal infrastructure for international competition outside of special organised matches, but perhaps that’s what makes this unique relationship possible in the push and pull of cross-cultural interaction through the shared love of sport.

Diamond Diplomacy screens 25th April as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Humint (휴민트, Ryoo Seung-wan, 2026)

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There’s something ironically dehumanising about the term “human intelligence”. Even the security services who court them seem to look down on their informants, viewing them more as traitors to their own side than those who’ve come over theirs. We have to ask ourselves if either side is really any better than the other. As Zo’s boss tells him, everyone’s just using each other to survive. There doesn’t seem to be a lot more to this world than that, just desperate struggle and cynicism.

Ryoo Seung-wan’s Humint (휴민트) is, like many similar films, at least as equally critical of the South as it is the North as the idealistic NIS officer finds himself an outlier among his comparatively coldhearted colleagues. In the course of his mission trying to find out who’s selling drugs to teenagers in Korea, Zo (Zo In-sung) uncovers a human trafficking network operated by the Russian mafia targeting North Korean women possibly with the complicity of their government. But his bosses don’t care about that, they just want the drugs, and it’s a bonus that they come from the North. Zo dangles the possibility of salvation in front of a woman trapped in a South East Asian brothel, but when it comes down to it, his boss won’t approve her rescue. They’ve effectively killed her, but all his boss tells him is that you have to get used to this sort of thing and you can’t afford to get hung up on each and every informant.

Still, what they’re asking them to do is necessarily dangerous and any promise they may make about protecting their informants is a lie. On the other side, the North sends young women to Vladivostok as “foreign currency earners” ostensibly working in a restaurant, but actually used as honeytraps drugging their clients and sleeping with them to get them hooked. Seon Hwa (Shin Se-kyung) is, ironically, in this position because the North does not seem to have kept its promises either. Her mother has advanced cancer, but her treatment needs money and so her father started smuggling to get it. When he got caught, her whole family was disgraced. She had to drop out of university and begin working as a foreign currency earner, breaking her engagement with top torturer Geon (Park Jeong-min). Geon is in town because he suspects the locale consular official is complicit with a series of mysterious disappearances of North Koreans near the Russian border, and he’s right. 

Hwang (Park Hae-joon) is certainly a slippery individual, apparently making Vladivostok his own personal fiefdom and, in the end, over playing his hand in trying to use Seon Hwa to take out Geon when he could probably just have let her go to make Geon leave him alone. “Do what you have to do to survive”, most people seem to say and it’s clear that personal relationships cannot reallysurive in this world in which human life is cheap. Seon Hwa and Geon’s romance was broken by the brutality of the North Korean regime, but it seems that the South is unwilling to save them. When Zo realises that Seon Hwa’s cover has been blown, he breaks protocol to try and save her, not wanting another woman’s death on his conscience. But though he unmasks the human trafficking ring, he’s reprimanded by his superiors who still complain that they’ve not made enough progress on the drugs case because Zo got sidetracked by the trafficked women. 

The women are, obviously, the ones who suffer because of these too regimes and perhaps by extension the division of Korea. Seon Hwa does her best to fight back, saving the other women so they can escape together, but is finally left with nothing. She has no country, and only asks to be sent somewhere where nobody knows her to start again. Expressing a new cold war anxiety born of geopolitical fluctuations as the South contends with the uncertainties of the North’s interplay with Russia and China, Ryoo’s espionage thriller has a retro quality, but also hints at contemporary unease, suggesting finally that there are really no good guys left and even idealists like Zo are compromised by their allegiance to an inhuman regime. Zo and Geon may become temporary allies in their quest to save Seon Hwa, but just as often point their guns a each other in Ryoo’s impressively staged action scenes amid a constant atmosphere of mistrust and betrayal.

Trailer (English subtitles)

BAKA’s Identity (愚か者の身分, Koto Nagata, 2025)

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What does a name really mean? Can you really start over just by swapping your current identity for a new one, and what would that actually mean for the rest of your new life? Two young men who’ve been failed by adults and authority figures become involved with yahoo boy-style cyber crime, only in this case the aim of their romance fraud is to trap men they already know are poor and desperate and convince them they can turn their lives around by lending their identities to “someone in trouble”. 

It’ll only be for two years, they say. Just lie low, try not attract attention from the authorities. Though the targets also get a new identity in the form of a driving license with another name, they’re told not to use it for driving because the police will run checks on it if they have an accident. But the truth is that despite the widespread believe that it’s easy to disappear in Japan, it’s actually quite hard to live without a formal proof of identity through the family register system. You can’t rent an apartment or get a regular job, because on paper you don’t exist. The fake ID they’ve been given is only good enough to pass as proof of age. It’s not going to stand up if someone actually does more than glance at it.

But even if the idea of being able to wipe everything clean and start again might be attractive, the reality it not quite so easy. You can’t just wipe away your existing fears and traumas, and they’ll follow you even into your new life. Takuya (Takumi Kitamura), who’s been doing this sort of thing longer, is conflicted on realising their latest mark, Egawa (Yuma Yamoto), is a broken man who can’t get over the death of his daughter at the hands of his wife. Though Takuya, and the young woman they have assisting them with the scam, don’t want to do something like this to someone who’s already suffered so much, this world is pretty brutal and in reality they no longer have much choice.

Kisara (Mizuki Yamashita) is only involved in the scam because her mother stole her scholarship fund and she needed money for university, but she’s since dropped out and seems to be doing this kind of thing full-time. Takuya too seemingly had no parental support and sold his own identity to pay for medical treatment he hoped would save his brother, but he died anyway. That might be why he feels so protective of Mamoru (Yuta Hayashi), a young man he met in a homeless shelter run by the yakuza for the purpose of getting them to apply for benefits and then stealing them all. Mamoru was also abandoned by his mother and suffered physical abuse in his familial environment. Takuya brings Mamoru in on the scam and his life in the criminal underworld thinking it would help him, only to later feel guilty when events spiral out of control.

Takuya may look to his boss, Sato (Goichi Mine), as a kind of big brother figure, but also knows that he most likely plans to throw him under the bus while plotting to rob gangland kingpin Joji (Kazuya Tanabe) of a windfall gained through gold smuggling. Various people warn Takuya that it’s best to get out now, because if you go too deep you never will, but Takuya knows his bid for escape is likely to fail even when he turns to former mentor Kajitani who convinced him to sell his identity in the first place. The irony is that Takuya sold his name without a second thought and doesn’t really think his identity’s worth anything, which might be why he thought it was worth rolling the dice just to see if he could change his situation. The film’s Japanese title might ask us who we thought was being “fooled,” the men whom Takuya scammed who convinced to give up their identities for what seemed to them at the time a lot of money, or Takuya and Mamoru deluded both by the opportunities of a life of crime and by the allure of escape. In the all end, all any of them really have is each other and the unexpectedly genuine connections that arise between them in opposition to a society that has already discarded them and a hellish underworld in which an identity is just another commodity to be bought, sold, or sacrificed at will.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Bunny!! (Thỏ Ơi!!, Trấn Thành, 2026)

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The host of a TV show offering love advice begins to reassess her marriage when probed by a guest who turns out to have an unexpected connection to her personal life in Trấn Thành’s outlandish drama, Bunny!! (Thỏ Ơi!!) Though it may originally seem as if the film intends to sympathise with female oppression in a male dominated society, it soon swings back with a more conservative conclusion in which the heroine seems to blame herself for the issues she uncovers in a marriage she assumed to be perfect.

Linh (Lyly) hosts a show in the guise of the “Shoulder Sister” in which she gives relationship advice to mainly female guests who wear animal masks to disguise their identity and are hidden from her in an adjacent room. She and her husband Phong (Vĩnh Đam) are currently living with her sister, Lan (Văn Mai Hương), who has her own business empire and is married to a younger man, Son (Quốc Anh). Lan is intensely jealous and henpecks her husband, becoming incredibly angry and upset when she goes through his phone and finds a picture from a party he was at that an ex-girlfriend apparently also attended. Linh is scandalised that her sister’s friends think setting your partner’s pin and trawling through their message is normal behaviour, insisting that she has no need for that and is completely confident in her relationship with Phong. 

But the film opens with her filming footage for YouTube of a “romantic date” during which she snaps at Phong and later rejects his attempts to initiate intimacy. The film characterises the two sisters as bossy and finds humour in the way they manipulate their husbands, but at the same time locates the source of marital breakdown in their career success and independence, even suggesting that all their problems are down to not listening to the their husbands. Of course, it’s not sexist to suggest that communication issues can derail a marriage, but the conversation needs to flow both ways. Linh confronts Phong when she she begins to suspect him of having an affair, but he turns it back on her and says he feels lonely in their marriage because she doesn’t have time for him any more while showing few signs of being willing to take time out of his career as an executive at her sister’s company. It’s difficult for her to tell whether he has a point that she’s essentially self-involved and afraid of confrontation, refusing his requests to talk by placing a time limit on arguments and unilaterally making decisions rather than trying to reach a compromise or give Phong a chance to understand, or is just trying to gaslight her by making her think this is all her fault so she doesn’t look too closely at his behaviour.

The advice she’d give another woman would be to leave at the first sign of trouble, which is what she tells Bunny (Pháo) when she comes on the show looking for advice about how to leave an abusive partner. Though she’s tried to break up with him several times, Bunny’s ex, Kim (Trấn Thành), has been stalking and threatening her. Asked why she didn’t leave earlier, she replies that it’s hard to leave someone who really loves you, which is an odd characterisation of this obsessive connection. Nevertheless, when she comes back later saying she was able to break things off with Kim but has drifted into an affair with a married man, it becomes difficult for Linh to assess whether she got her nickname for being a bunny boiler and is stalking a man who isn’t interested, or has been tricked by the false promises of a cheating louse who told her he was “separated” and just waiting for the paperwork to come through on his divorce.

Nevertheless, Bunny too is made to feel guilty and responsible for Kim’s behaviour because he lost his leg in a traffic accident while working hard to contribute to their future. Uncomfortably, the film makes Kim’s disability the butt of a joke while also using it to undercut his masculinity by suggesting that no other women will want him nor will he be able to find steady employment. All of which is presented as justification for his controlling behaviour which grows steadily more concerning just as Bunny’s own pursuit of her married lover is depicted by some as that of a crazed and lovelorn woman no better than Kim. 

In the end, however, the solution is found in female solidarity with Linh listening to Bunny’s story and protecting her while Lan’s friends provide essential emotional support as she tries to sort things out with Son to make their marriage a little less volatile. But the revelations of the finale would seem to undercut all of that as Linh asks herself once again if she really was at fault for neglecting her husband and is therefore responsible for the way that he behaved rather than condemning his emotional cowardice and the way it led him to treat Linh and others. As such it reinforces some conservative ideas about a wife’s role and female subservience rather than allowing Linh to reassess her view of a “perfect” marriage and ask herself if she’s really happy or merely in love with an idealised image of marital success.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Hole, 309 Days to the Bloodiest Tragedy (Bolong, 309 Hari Sebelum Tragedi Berdarah, Hanung Bramantyo, 2026)

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There’s something about a hole in the ground that invites mystery. Who put it there and why, where does it lead, and should we be worried about people falling in or what might crawl out of there that someone or something might have wished stayed buried. Hanung Bramantyo’s The Hole (Bolong, 309 Hari Sebelum Tragedi Berdarah) digs back to the Indonesia of the mid-1960s in which one kind of authoritarian rule is dying while the new had not yet been born. His hero finds himself torn between conflicting loyalties while straddling class boundaries as he searches for a potentially inconvenient truth behind the murders of several local officials.

The opening title cards tell us that this story takes place before a “national tragedy” in which seven army officers were murdered and their bodies thrown into a well during the 30 September Movement’s failed coup attempt. The killings are blamed both on “the communists” and perhaps on the army engaging in some questionable manoeuvres of its own. Sugeng (Baskara Mahendra) is charged with finding out the truth in order to rehabilitate the army’s image. He’s also made aware, however, that the village lies in a convenient spot for anyone who might be looking to launch a coup against Sukarno, which presumably includes Suharto. 

But what he quickly finds is that each of the dead men arguably deserved it and that the list of people who might have wanted them gone is quite long even before you start adding in ghosts. Each of them is someone with legitimate political power that they have enthusiastically misused. The village head Sumanto said he’d fix local infrastructure but embezzled the money for himself while bribing the police chief to turn a blind eye. The village secretary scammed the local farmers and trapped them in debt. Dependent on these authority figures, the locals were powerless to oppose them and those who attempted to speak out were quickly silenced. 

Some attribute these killings to the communists for that reason in that taking out corrupt officials is in line with their ideology, though it could just as likely be a person or group of people fed up with living under this system as Sukarno’s “guided democracy” began to fall apart due to its increasing dependence on China and Russia which further inflamed the nationalists and military. Sukarno had indeed based his system of government on a traditional village, but this one is rotten to the core as the corrupt officials all protect each other. Others argue that the killings are the revenge of a “hollow ghost,” and even if some are as dismissive of the supernatural as educated policeman Sugeneng, the term could perhaps stand in for many who have been hollowed out by governmental betrayal and pushed beyond breaking point. 

Sugeng may not believe in ghosts, but he stands in an awkward position. He was a adopted as a child by a wealthy man from just that village who is now on his deathbed. Sugeng’s adoptive father badgers him into marrying his adopted sister, Arum (Carissa Perusset), though he feels uncomfortable with it and even if assured by his imam that there’s nothing untoward about the arrangement still thinks of Arum as a sister. It’s tempting then to think that his present predicament is caused by the breaking of a taboo, or that, as an adopted son, he’s inherited a dark legacy stemming from his father’s wealth and privilege while doing his best to forget his roots and inhabit this new upper-class world. Back in the village, one of the guards on duty at the time of the murder pranked a friend with a black magic book made to look like the Quran, and perhaps it’s not so far-fetched to consider that dark sorcery is a possible cause for the strange events.

Sugeng, however, has no idea what he’s up against. He can’t see the political context nor his family’s fading fortunes nor is he really prepared for the truth behind the murders. It doesn’t quite occur to him that there might be a dark truth within his own household and callously ignores his new’s complaints about being chased by ghosts, focussing on his case and rarely coming home as she tries to care for her dying father alone. The holes here are the one’s in Sugeng’s, and the nation’s, buried histories, but it’s all still there and waiting to be unearthed. “The nation is not in a good state,” Sugeng’s imam friend warns him, and it seems that you can’t really blame anyone for turning to one dark side or another when things are as bad and confusing as they currently seem to be.

Trailer (English subtitles)