It's a masterpiece. Just like that.
It's an amazing and very heavy film, I wouldn't lie if I said it was the heaviest movie I've ever seen. Nekrasov has a poem “Frost, Red Nose”, which is very similar to this film in its black tearful fullness and style. Accepting such things intimately, passing through your gut, is quite ruthless towards your mental health. I had similar experiences, at least with the same Nekrasov, so let me be honest: here I was safe – I watched some episodes, trying to detach myself, because you can not get away with tears here. I read somewhere that Konchalovsky cried profusely over the finale of the Night of Kabiria. For some reason, while watching this work Imai I remembered Konchalovsky with his tear maze and I laughed a lot at him.
If we continue the topic of literary associations, then of course it should be said that Dostoevsky smells a lot from this work, only Imai is more naturalistic and cynical, honesty is more. I so understood that the script was made according to the novel by Tsutom Minakami, so there is one scene almost direct borrowing from The Idiot - a scene with the dead Nastasia Filippovna in the house of Rogozhin. But all sorts of literary associations and borrowings of the film do not almost spoil. The film is very organic. The concise Japanese simplicity, thanks to which Freudianism and dignity become natural, quite Japanese folk.
What's the movie? The dark side. It's about a very ordinary, normal human psychopathy, which is so easy to see and not hear, but if something happens, some mechanisms work, and this cowardly shadow creeps out in all its black nakedness. What else? About how shitty life can be - a world without embellishment and curtsey with its beastly straightforwardness.
Despite all the dirt, the picture is very beautiful, even in the mud beauty, and beauty here is not for beauty. Nothing superfluous. Nicely done. Japanese nature is impeccable. Whether the shooting is indoors is wonderful. Acting work is breathtaking, Rentaro Mikuni is absolutely truthful, brilliantly disgusting, a real animal.
I'll stop, please.
10 out of 10.