When I saw the trailers for this it looked like a zany hero fantasy and stereotypical Japanese perv movie. But like Death Note it turned out to be very different from my expectations. This is the longest movie I've ever seen but I wasn't thinking about time at all, even though I stayed up until dawn.
It's not a matter of the plot moving slowly. This is simply a very long story. It slowly takes a turn into a nightmarish land where I wished someone would just come in and off some of the characters or there would be a sudden change and a happy ending. But it keeps getting darker and harder to watch until I wished I could watch something as simple as Audition. But this is far more disturbing. Like some other films that delve into depths of genuine severity it's uncomfortable to sit through the later part of the film but it doesn't have the amorality that really turns me off those movies. A dilemma of writing a film review is you have to describe the film while saying as little as possible about what actually happens.
The earlier part of the film is comic in a way that's rather disarming but doesn't jar abruptly with the later part. It's far removed from the sort of Japanese extreme cinema you'd seen from ten years ago. It's not quite so overpoweringly cinematic despite the frequent use of classical music. In aesthetic it's more similar to Death Note.
This is quite a hard film to write about. It doesn't have the sort of definition that earlier Japanese films do and yet I can sense something that's waiting to come out. A bit like when I watched Jin Roh it would only really hit me the morning after. It's definitely absorbing and I'd recommend it to anyone, especially J film fans like me. There is a bit of blood in it (these things are relative) but it doesn't have the deliberate gore of some other extreme films. Mitsushima Hikari (Sayu) has a leading role in this film.
Considering how hard this film is it's difficult to actually like it, but if you can watch all of it it's not an experience you should miss.
