A voice from the past Reporter Eiji Akutsu was tasked with an unsolved 35-year-old case. It featured a group of people who extorted money from the “powerful” in an unusual way. They sent cassettes of children's voices to victims. At the same time, Toshiya Sonae lives in Kyoto and runs an atelier. One day, in his late father’s belongings, he finds a cassette recording of his childhood voice. . .
Japanese detective - there is something special in it, its charm, slowness and depth. But not in this case. The creators failed to convey the depth of emotions and bitterness of despair, experiences of the past, which constantly haunt the heroes as if in a terrible dream. All this is in the novel of the same name by Shiota Takeshi, the adaptation of which this film is. I think it turned out to be a somewhat superficial transfer of the plot, based on the background of a kind of TV investigation. All these endless interviews and memories of different characters, trips from Tokyo to London, from London to Kyoto, etc. Constantly knocks down, although it has its effect, the appeal to the past of the heroes - to 1984, 1980, where everything was born.
There is some confusion at the beginning when too many names are mentioned in the film. However, although I tried to remember them all at first, I just let them go. Gradually, the story becomes clear. Constant beatings and humiliations, endless attempts to escape or take revenge on the system, to prove to someone that you are worth something else - everything is mixed in a heap into a single lump that inexorably rolls forward, crushing under itself and breaking human destinies. I didn't think the ending would be what it was. When it seems that he is about to find the true culprit of what happened 35 years ago, new facts are suddenly revealed and completely different ones fall under suspicion.
Of course, this is all about the story itself. The acting was decent. Even the heroes of the second plan tried as much as possible to embody the difficult fate of their characters on the screen. Uno Shohei, for example, won the Asian Film Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in this film (Soichiro). Shun Oguri perfectly got used to the role of reporter Eiji Akutsu – his calmness, sometimes confusion or bewilderment completely trust and recharge. Same goes for Gen Hoshino. I remember him on the melodrama “Love is Blind” (2013), what a multifaceted actor, it turns out.
By the way, it is very interesting that the novel and the film are based on a real criminal story with the extortion “Glico Morinaga case” – one of the largest unsolved cases that occurred in the 1980s. It is worth considering that the creators gave only one possible hypothesis about who was the true culprits of the story and what they wanted, based on these mysteries. Filming of the film ended in June 2019.
6 out of 10