Cinema has an odd preoccupation with twins. The uncanniness of seeing more than one person with the same face in the same frame injects a note of inescapable unease, not least because of the oddness of the techniques required to make one actor appear to be in two places at once. Shadowfall (影踏み, Kagefumi) adapted from the mystery novel by 64’s Hideo Yokoyama, places the “evil twin” motif at its heart but, perhaps a little uncomfortably, uses it as a metaphor for the shadow self as the conflicted hero attempts to find closure with past trauma and family legacy in order to reintegrate his two selves into one complete whole capable of living a life both spiritually and emotionally honest.
As the film opens, ace cat burgler Shuichi (Masayoshi Yamazaki) is in the process of breaking into the home of a local politician. Whilst there, however, he discovers petrol pooled on the hall floor and the politician’s wife, Yoko (Yuri Nakamura), nervously grasping a cigarette lighter. He manages to snap the lighter shut before she can use it, saving her life (as well as that of the husband she was about to kill), but is then caught by a policeman, Sosuke (Pistol Takehara), who happened to be “just passing by” and is also, coincidentally, a childhood friend. Shuichi gets two years, and is met on his release by a young man, Keiji (Takumi Kitamura), dressed in incongruously old-fashioned, gangster-style clothes and adressing him as “Shuichi-ni” or “big brother Shuichi”. Together, the pair form a small crime fighting team determined to find out what became of Yoko while poking their noses into some conspiratorial corruption which links her with yakuza, police, and the judiciary. The situation is further complicated when Sosuke is found dead after a visit to Yoko’s bar, leaving Shuichi implicated in the possible murder of his old friend.
Reflecting on the case, police detective Mabuchi (Shingo Tsurumi), who also knew Shuichi in his youth, remarks that twins are tied to each other like heaven is to hell. One will necessarily drag the other down. Later, he corrects himself, that if is that is true then the reverse must also be and one should be able to raise the other up. What we see, however, is largely the former. We discover that Shuichi had an identical twin who was “no good”, a petty teenage hoodlum always in trouble with the police where he was a top student preparing to study the law and become a prosector. Their mother (Shinobu Otake), a teacher, found herself a victim of social stigma as the mother of a criminal, asked to resign from her job because a woman who can’t raise her own son to be a law abiding citizen is not fit to educate those of others. Hisako (Machiko Ono), who had been friends with both the boys and is still carrying a smouldering torch for the “good” Shuichi, experiences something of the same when she’s targeted by a creepy stalker (Kenichi Takito) who leaks her “criminal associations” on the message board of the nursery school where she too teaches.
Having waited for him all these years, Hisako is praying for the restoration of the Shuichi she once knew who was good where his brother was “bad”. Despite her deep and abiding love for him, she claims to have chosen Shuichi, rather than his brother, because loving the good is the safer, more responsible choice. Shuichi, meanwhile, describes himself as walking in his brother’s shadow, a darkened space into which Hisako wishes to be admitted but is wilfully denied. He tells himself he does this to keep her safe, but is in reality unable to step into that space himself and occupy it as a full and complete person. He claims that his criminality is an act of revenge when it is actually a kind of self-harm that ensures his two selves, the shadow self that is his departed brother, and the ghost self which is the cat burglar, will remain forever separate.
Talking with another twin whose mirroring of his brother had even darker results, Shuichi confesses that to share a soul with another human being is a terrible curse and one he secretly longed to be released from. It’s this latent sense of guilt which haunts him, cleaving his soul in two. Only by dealing with the traumatic past, the memories inflamed by Yoko whose burden is a fear of an excessive “niceness” she too must learn to let go, can he reintegrate his two selves into one complete whole with only a single shadow. A noirish tale of haunting grief and unresolved regret, Shadowfall finds hope in the simple act of acceptance and the promised restoration of the imperfect whole.
Screened as part of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2020.
International trailer (English subtitles)
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