One Cut of the Dead (2017)

Original title: カメラを止めるな!, Kamera o Tomeru na!

Warning: Structural spoilers are really unavoidable here!

A director (Takayuki Hamatsu) is shooting an extremely low budget zombie movie in this sort of thing’s natural environs, an abandoned industrial building. He’s clearly just a wee bit shy of a complete violent breakdown, which will certainly turn out well once the zombie movie shoot is inevitably attacked by actual zombies (whose appearance will turn out to be his fault, of course).

After 35 minutes or so of great, slightly weird, and often pretty funny and inventive shoestring budget zombie movie fun, the film cuts back one month to reveal that what we have just seen is the product of an insane offer made to mild-mannered director, who prides himself on his averageness to boot, Takayuki Higurashi (hey, it’s Takayuki Hamatsu again!). The newly minted Zombie Channel wants the director to make a short zombie movie to be broadcast live and filmed with only one camera without any edits. Higurashi isn’t really the guy who takes creative risks, but since his relationship to his daughter Mao (Mao) is a bit strained, and her favourite hot young actor of the moment (Kazuaki Nagaya as Kazuaki Kamiya) is going to be cast as the male lead, he is willing to, for once in his life. All kinds of craziness ensues.

Shinichiro Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead isn’t just that most rare of things, a funny zombie comedy, it is also that even rarer thing, a film about filmmaking that doesn’t disappear down its own ass. In fact, one of the greatest and most riveting things about this utterly brilliant piece of filmmaking is how little it tries to praise the lonesome auteur out to make some art (or “real cinema” as suddenly grumpy old man Marty Scorsese would probably say) but is interested in the creative craziness of art that can just happen when hired hands, bystanders roped into important roles, and people just trying to do their jobs as well as they can come together, not in a purposeful gesture to create something for the ages, but while trying to just get something together that hopefully doesn’t suck, somehow falling in love with it and the process of making it.

And really, unlike all those very serious films about filmmaking you’ll encounter in most “best films of all times” lists, One Cut is a much more successful and believable argument for filmmaking as a thing of pain (half of its jokes are based on things going very wrong indeed, after all) and of great joy, a paean to the creative spark that is utterly convincing exactly because it doesn’t want to convince us of anything. It just is.

For a film that is as much about spontaneous craziness as this one, it is also brilliantly constructed, setting up jokes in the first five minutes that’ll pay off wonderfully an hour later, and not afraid to follow the exhilarating zombie movie inside of the movie with what feels like a very slow series of sequences that introduce the characters and their foibles. A series of sequences that will turn out to be completely indispensible for what follows, not just setting up further jokes down the line (and there are so, so many utterly hilarious jokes in here) but also creating compassionate and pretty damn heart-warming character arcs I really wouldn’t have expected from this sort of project at all. For One Cut is also that rare kind of comedy that truly seems to love its characters, prepared to let them suffer indignities but also always genuinely on their side.


Add to all this Ueda’s great inventiveness when it comes to physical comedy as well as to the somewhat more cerebral kinds, and you’ll end up with a film that’s as perfect as anything I’ve ever seen. That the whole thing apparently only cost the yen equivalent of $25,000 to make is really just the cherry on top. Or the camera on the human pyramid, in this case.