A series of very peculiar murders that appear to be committed by the victims’ goldfish hits Tokyo. The police is understandably confused. Fortunately, there’s a female eccentric genius detective (Erika Oka, I believe) working for them who doesn’t just believe in the supernatural but is also a hell of an investigator of very weird crime, despite the scepticism of the guy who’ll become her new partner.
Because murderous goldfish aren’t weird enough, somehow involved in the proceedings are a cult of mutants with dubious powers and goals.
This comedic supernatural mystery finds director Yukihiko Tsutsumi going over some of his favourite ground again (Spec and its surroundings certainly come to mind): there are weird murders that contain elements of the Locked Room and/or Impossible Crime style of mystery fiction, a very weird female genius detective who is on the spectrum paired up with a more normal younger copper, supernatural shenanigans somewhere between X-Files and X-Men that may very well end up turning apocalyptic in the sequel, and direction that distracts from any budgetary limitations with every eccentric trick in the book.
Also very typical of what I’ve seen of Tsutsumi that isn’t a classic tear jerker is an ability to shift tone from utter weirdness to serious drama to slapstick and back again on a moment’s notice while somehow making this feel like a natural consequence of the absurd worlds his characters populate. These shifts are rather common in Japanese nerd media, of course, but Tsutsumi’s approach always feels more organic than that of some of his peers to me, as if in this director’s world view, the absurdly comical and the tragic weren’t two sides of the same coin, but both sides shared, at once.
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