G@me (2003): Supposed to be a twisty crime thriller with some satirical elements, Satoshi Isaka’s adaptation of a novel by Keigo Higashino (that may very well be much better) is exactly the sort of thing that gives twist-based movies a bad name: as is oh so typical the plot twists manage to be completely obvious to anyone who has seen a couple of movies yet also make a mockery out of the characters’ behaviour the audience has witnessed throughout. It doesn’t help that we spend our time with two characters (as played by Naohito Fujiki and Yukie Nakama’s respective hair-dos) who are at once deeply unlikeable and terribly boring, nor that their attempts at faking a kidnapping really rather belong in a Coen Brothers comedy, but are played completely straight here.
Some of this is certainly meant as a critique of early 00’s Japanese capitalism, but the bland writing, the one note characters and Isaka’s slick yet uninteresting direction bury that lede rather effectively.
My Girlfriend is a Serial Killer aka Love and Murder of Sheep and Wolf aka Hitsuji to Okami no Koi to Satsujin (2019): Also not as successful as I’d like it to be is this manga adaptation by Kayoko Asakura, about a hikikomori (Yosuke Sugino) who falls in love with the neighbour (Haruka Fukuhara) he has started spying on through a hole in the connecting wall between their apartments, and continues to do so even when she turns out to be serial killer. This one suffers from the weird decision to underplay how perverse its set up actually is and go from there. Instead it plays things off as if this were a pretty traditional romantic comedy, just with more bursts of blood and violence as central problems to the relationship. Even the random murder of strangers is played without any weight, not just by the characters but by the film as a whole.
It’s a much better movie than this post’s first entry, mind you: it is entertaining throughout, it just never gets anywhere interesting or too unpleasant (which we might blame the manga for?) with a set-up absolutely built to.
The Night Digger aka The Road Builder (1971): This British movie by Alastair Reid, apparently adapted from a Joy Cowley novel by Roald Dahl to get post-stroke work for his wife, the excellent Patricia Neal, on the other hand, does know a bit about the perverse, and willingly admits to it. When the film is not a bit of a broad satire of the manners of the country bourgeoisie, this is an in turns sharp and ambiguous movie about loneliness, horrible families, and the way the worst kind of love can worm itself into one’s heart if one has been beaten around by life enough. It’s also a thriller with a nasty streak that still manages to feature little to no on-screen violence, a sleazy bit of exploitation that seems to beam its nastiest implications into your brain instead of showing it, and a heart-breaking character study for Neal.
It’s pretty fantastic in often very unexpected ways, is what I’m saying.
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