Murder at Shijinso (2019)

aka Murder at the House of Death

Original title: 屍人荘の殺人

A university’s would-be great detective (Tomoya Nakamura) and his Watson (Ryunosuke Kamiki) are drawn into an actual murder mystery and more when actual girl detective Hiruko Kenzaki (Minami Hamabe) presses them into accompanying her to a dubious get-together of their University’s “Rock club” that’s taking place in a pretty impressive pension out in the boons close to a local rock festival.

In actuality, the rock club event is used as a feeding trough for older alumni to look for women in pretty damn toxically masculine way.

When a zombie outbreak occurs at the festival, the group – and a few other survivors they picked up at the festival - has to lock themselves inside the pension. Inside isn’t as safe as one would hope, for a mysterious series of seemingly impossible murders occurs that may have more to do with the shittiness of the male rock club people than a zombie apocalypse.

Having enjoyed the pretty incredible locked room/impossible crime but with zombies novel by Masahiro Imamura this is based on (published in English translation as “Death Among the Undead”), I found myself very disappointed with Hisashi Kimura’s adaptation. It’s not only that the adaptation doubles down on the weakest element of the novel – the Light Novel style characterisations right out of otaku central that just scream “I want to be adapted into a manga!” – it also changes a lot of details of its source in ways that are clearly meant to make the material faster paced and less talky. These changes do indeed sharpen the film’s pacing, but they also make the material less rich as a mystery and file off quite a few telling details that enrich the story emotionally and intellectually.

In consequence, the murders are mechanically less complex and mysterious, the background behind the killings and the killer’s character also become less complex and less compelling, and the handful of actual emotional beats don’t hit as well. The the film sacrifices everything that makes the book as fun and interesting as it is for a faster pace that isn’t the be all and end all in a somewhat traditional mystery like this anyway. Seeing these kinds of pointless changes in an adaptation is more than a little frustrating.

How this looks to someone who hasn’t read the novel, I obviously can’t speculate about.