Darkness has won... He feels the connection between pleasure and suffering. You can’t read about it in books, it can only be experienced by yourself.
A good French detective with a Japanese accent. Japan has always been a mysterious and closed country. That's how this movie turned out. In which the action, leisurely like a geisha dance, is more than compensated by a skillfully inflated atmosphere of fear, which does not leave you throughout the viewing. The film is based on the novel of the same name by the famous writer Edogawa Rampo, in his homeland deservedly recognized as the ancestor of the modern Japanese detective. A detective novel called “Inju” was published by him back in 1928, and in 1977 the first film adaptation was filmed in Japan, quite close in spirit to the original source. The French director Barbe Schroeder, somewhat departed from the plot of the original work, transferring the action to our time and turning the main character into a Frenchman. Which undoubtedly made the plot and the hero closer to understanding the modern European viewer. I think this is why the ending of the novel was significantly changed. Good or bad, it's up to you. But if you do not go into details and take the film as a separate creation, then overall it makes a pretty strong impression. Especially struck by the shocking and completely unpredictable outcome of the picture. What is the most important thing for a detective.
Love became pain, pain became anger, and anger became a passionate desire for revenge.
Thanks to the skillfully used expressive and pictorial means, the picture delicately balances on the verge of mysticism and eroticism. It is a bright color, even with all the gloom of this narrative. Unbearable cruelty, dirty love games, ruthlessness of heroes towards each other. This is very different from other French films. This is facilitated by a special national Japanese flavor, with all the attributes of local culture present - helpful geisha, sake, tea ceremony and traditional Japanese house "minka". Against the background of all this, the “gaijin”, i.e. a stranger, a foreigner, performed by the French actor Benoit Majimel, stands out, both externally and in character. What gives the picture a dramatic contrast, between the lonely figure of a stranger in the foreground and the Japanese living in their own isolated world. As befits all the canons of the detective genre, then follows a skillful author's hoax. Literary critic Koreske Ishigami notes: “If Po is a great mystic, then Rampo is no less a great mystifier.” Due to this, throughout the plot, the viewer will struggle with the mystery of the identity of the mysterious killer. The solution of which in the end will be a complete surprise for the viewer.
Darkness has won, goodness and love are drowning in a pool of blood, and the criminal goes on to sow evil.
10 out of 10