My number three film of 2007 is Nightmare Detective (Akumu Tantei) by veteran indy helmer Tsukamoto Shinya. This is a film about death, emptiness and suicide - a contemporary topic if ever there was one. With more than 33,000 who do the deed every year, for many years now, for numerous Japanese the wish to die sometimes seems greater than the wish to live. Suicidal thoughts apparently are on the minds of many and that fits nicely in Tsukamoto's perennial themes of urban isolation and alienation.
What is it about?
The "Nightmare Detective" is a tormented, reclusive young man called Kagenuma (Matsuda Ryuhei, the "beautiful boy" from Gohatto), who dresses in a simple hooded cloak. He has the power to enter the dreams of other people, but this a painful proces for him. Himself suicidal, he sees his gift as a curse.
The heroine of the film is yuppie female cop Kirishima Keiko (pop star Hitomi in a strong first film role), who has just transferred to homicide out of an unconscious fascination with death. (She, too, is attracted to suicide in her dreams, where she meets a double of herself.) Her first two cases are the bizarre deaths of a punk girl and an obese salaryman, who have both slit their throats in apparent suicide while they were asleep.
Kirishima realizes that the deaths may not be suicides at all, but her bored, elder partner Sekiya (Osugi Ren) disagrees, and Kirishima only finds some support from her younger colleague Wakamiya (Ando Masanobu). She notices that just before their deaths both victims received a call from somebody identified as "0" on their cellphone screens. "Zero" of course denotes emptiness and death.
The parapsychological killer apparently does his grizzly work by entering the dreams of his victims. The punk girl, for example, wants to end her life but feels scared to die alone. She meets a stranger on the internet, a man who promises to die together (another social problem in present-day Japan). Then she is suddenly attacked by a ferocious invisible assailant - presumably the man to whom she talked-, who races up stairs and shoots through apartment buildings - filmed in classic frenzied Tsukamoto-style (the murderer is played by Tsukamoto himself) - finally slashing her to pieces on her bed.
Kirishima enlists the support of the - first unwilling - Nightmare Detective. She decides to be bait herself and dials Zero. And so a mad chase ensues through a terrible nightmare world...
What do I like about it?
- The face of Hitomi
Pop star Hitomi makes her thesping debut, and - while her acting has limitations - could not have found a better director to guide and mold her than Tsukamoto. Tsukamoto certainly makes the most of the youthful qualities of the leggy singer.
Hitomi plays an independent, strong woman, but although her eyes have a defiant stare, her face is characteristic Lolita. Tsukamoto has a fetish in all his films, be it metal, voyeurism or the human body, and here it is the face of Hitomi: Tsukamoto's camera most of the time is glued to her head, and what you remember most of the film, is Hitomi's face, floating up from the nightmarish darkness like a cherry blossom petal...
- Tsukamoto Shinya is still going strong
Fifteen years and ten films after Tetsuo, the Iron Man, Tsukamoto remains a true hands-on indie filmmaker. He has written the script, directs and plays one of the characters. Although backed here for the first time by a big studio and larger budget, he has not sold out his ideals, although the presence of Hitomi and Matsuda Ryohei helped attract a new, young public. His artistic integrity has remained fully intact and in fact, after the only "so-so" Vital and Haze, this is an interesting come-back to full Tsukamoto power!
- A world of sleep and death
Finally, this avant-garde mystery is another parody on J-Horror: the traditional long black hair figures in the opening scenes, but is immediately discarded and we also have the killing cell phone... But Tsukamoto's vision leads us into a real, dark world, where nearly anyone is just one step away from suicide, and where a mysterious lurker attacks people out of sheer spite from his gray, dusky dream-world. The result is a disturbing and yes... nightmarish film.
Links:
Official website.
Website on Tsukamoto Shinya with reviews of all his films.
Website of Hitomi.
