Cute Devil (1982)

Original title: Kawaii akuma

When her boyfriend is killed in an accident after she wishes him to die in the aftermath of a very bad row, music student Ryoko (Kumiko Akiyoshi) has a proper nervous breakdown. She’s institutionalized with the delusion of having caused the accident through the power of her feelings. While she’s being treated, Ryoko’s sister dies on her wedding day. In a curious parallel development the accidental death happens after little Alice (Tina Kawamura), sister of Ryoko’s brother-in-law for a day Koji (Hiroyuki Watanabe), wished Ryoko’s sister to die so Alice can inherit her bridal veil.

When Ryoko is well enough to leave the hospital, Koji, a genuinely nice guy if also a genuine idiot, as the course of the movie will show, invites her to stay with his sister Keiko (Miyoko Akaza) and Alice for some light work as something like Alice’s governess.

Ryoko quickly learns that something is very wrong with Alice – people around the girl turn up dead with increasing regularity, and while they all officially die of accidents and natural causes, just like Ryoko’s sister, Ryoko begins to believe Alice to be very unwell, and a kid serial killer.

So, on paper, Cute Devil is a very typical bad seed movie, with some interesting psychological parallels between the evil kid and the woman who begins to understand her true nature – with the difference that Ryoko isn’t actually a killer and is stricken by all the remorse for something she didn’t cause Alice is completely unable to feel for the things she actually does – and some clever borrowing from gaslighting thrillers.

In execution, this is utterly and completely a Nobuhiko Obayashi movie in which the master of kitsch, art and grotesquery overload does his thing with greatest enthusiasm and intensity. Given that this is also a TV movie, I have a hard time understanding how he managed not just to afford to make a film as beautifully and strangely composed as this one is, but also how he managed to get TV suits to let him do it. In its aesthetics, this is nearly as extreme as his masterpiece Hausu if not quite as deeply loaded on its metaphorical level. Sure, instead of Japanese soft rock, we have an incessant soundtrack of classical music (one suspects this is playing in music student Ryoko’s cracking mind throughout), but the striking effect remains, and the film’s visual language – between languidness and sharp edits and the kind of beauty often found shared by the tasteless and the macabre – is just as extreme as it is in Obayashi’s best movies made for the big screen.

The film’s final act is a thing to be seen and certainly not to be described, full of ideas I have a hard time anyone but this director pulling off in quite this way, and of a crazed intensity of emotion and imagination everybody should experience.

Of course, one needs to be in the mood for Obayashi in this exalted mode, and I couldn’t quite blame anyone who’d protest against Cute Devil for being too much for comfort or sanity – which is typically my reaction to the films of Ken Russell, whose aesthetics actually suggest Obayashi’s nastier British brother, now that I think about it – but if one allows this film into one’s head, it’s probably not going to leave it ever again.