And the saxophone mourned Electra. The sharpened steel of ordinary scissors pierces the throats of high school girls. Two victims. Both beautiful and excellent. The killers are known – a young large man and (a little younger) a fragile girl. He's a direct killer. She is a kind of gunner and a guilty witness. The police are on their ears. Their boss is a respected capital psychoanalyst. The media rejoices. Meanwhile, a third girl was killed in the exact following of the “man with scissors” technique, but ... not a man with scissors.
An investigative detective from Japan has all the attributes of his overseas counterparts. Against the backdrop of Hollywood and Europe, there is nothing new. But the task is not worth it – to catch up and overtake. The skillful use of well-known moves, coupled with the slowness of the narrative “in the Oriental” gives the film, if not originality, then freshness of the performance. Leitmotive saxophone in fragmentary howls aggravates the pretentious art color, which is not annoying at all. Toshiharu Ikeda, in the past, an activist of the avant-garde bi-movie, did not pump up the aesthetics of the picture, did not deprive the originality of camera delights.
“The Man with Scissors” is a typical psychological thriller with a Freudian background, with illustrations of psychopathic mania. The further into the plot, the more intrigue. Solutions to the mysteries arise, as a rule, a little earlier than planned by the scriptwriters, but this cannot be considered a strong drawback. The detective here is a bit of drama, and the motivation of the causes of the crime is more important than the authorship of the third unknown. The investigation ends twenty minutes before the final, but we are still being squashed with psychiatric therapy on the topic of the “Electra complex” with a complete cure of the disease. The seemingly hopeless tale of punishment for a crime has simply a rosy all-forgiveness. The reason for this is “and the others are better.” Collected from the very beginning, the coils of sympathy for the “villains” gave (under the same incessant sax) the final conclusion – “the patient is healthy, can be free.” Ikeda, hiding behind the director's desk, deftly played the charlatan - psychoanalyst, generously giving a second chance to the doomed. Do not condemn him for this - the main thing is that he coped with the genre and the movie made an interesting one.