The Sun Above, Death Below (1968)

Original title: Sogeki

Toru (Yuzo Kayama) is your typical movie professional killer: competent, emotionless on the outside, and a natural born loner. He also has performance problems in bed, the act of killing apparently giving him a feeling nothing else can compare to.

This changes somewhat when he encounters professional model Akiko (Ruriko Asaoka). It’s love (or something like it) on first sight, the just as lonely and lonesome Akiko recognizing a kindred spirit in him, and he in her. Even the sex is going to work out between the two, eventually. Akiko’s obsession with catching a huge New Guinean butterfly fits so perfectly with Toru’s own mental bizarrerie, the couple can dream about going to New Guinea so she can catch her super butterfly and he can shoot all kinds of birds dead (seriously).

The film could turn into a very weird romance movie about people who fantasize (well, I say, fantasize, but as the film plays it, this might very well be actually happening) about donning “New Guinean” garb as interpreted by a racist and brownface and going on a drum and dancing session in their hotel room. However, the killer’s newest job of helping some yakuza acquaintances murdering a whole gold smuggling ring soon finds him hunted by the best killer of some probably rather irate Chinese gold smugglers, which is certainly good for his shooting and adrenaline kink, but perhaps not terribly great for anyone’s health.

Hiromichi Horikawa’s Sun Above is quite the film. It was clearly influenced by a horde of other movies about professional killers and very consciously presents many a nod to other films from the sub-genre. It harbours a particular affinity towards Branded to Kill, seeing as they both are Japanese movies turning a deep fascination with the psycho-sexual elements of violence into moments of the surreal and the bizarre, not to mention the butterflies.

Horikawa isn’t going as all out all the time as Seijun Suzuki does, tending to play the action scenes straighter, and not adding quite as many peculiar subversions into every single scene, clearly trying to not alienate completely an audience that came to watch movie star Kayama in a straightforward hitman thriller. So about half of the film is a relatively standard, excellently shot and staged crime movie; the other half either includes bizarre elements or gets up to semi-psychedelic freak-outs. That hotel scene that may or may not be a fantasy is the most obvious example, but there’s also a sex scene that uses documentary shots of black people in deeply problematic ways together with extreme close-ups of skin, psychedelic effects, classical European imagery and ends on a little chat about Icarus. Going by the film’s Camus-quoting ending, it’s all in the service of a very particular interpretation of existentialism. However, it is just as easy – and much more entertaining - to read Death Above as a movie about obsessions and kink, mainly for and about a holy trinity of guns, sex and death (where the middle part is only possible in close connection to the other two), with a side-line in butterflies and the dubious objectification of black bodies, overloading all of these elements with an intensity that you can read as subversive, deconstructive, bizarre, or just plain silly.

Me, I’m going with all of the above, raising my eyebrow at some of the philosophy (which may or may not be made worse – or better for that matter - by not always elegantly translated subtitles) and the racial bits, giggling and gasping at Horikawa’s general aesthetic daring, enjoying the weirdness as well as the straightforward excellence of the more conventional parts of the film, while mentally applauding a cast able to inhabit the film’s world as if it were the most natural thing in the world.