Slow-burn horror from writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is aptly titled, but ultimately a near miss, mostly from its hard-to-swallow third act. It certainly starts well with a prologue that traps a pathological serial killer after his brief escape from a holding cell in a police office building. With no way out, the murderer still manages to make his point to the detective who’d been conducting the interview. The film then jumps ahead a few years as the detective, now retired from the force and teaching college, keeps one foot in the game by investigating a cold case disappearance that happened near his new home six years ago. Clues point to his odd duck of a neighbor whose personality runs hot and cold*, yet forms an unlikely friendship with the ex-detective’s discontented wife. And that’s when you start to pick up on how this story is developing into a fool-me-once/fool-me-twice suspense thriller built from lessons not learned in that gruesome prologue. But Kurosawa gets sloppy, unable to convince us of the creep’s powers of persuasion over his ‘assistants,’ while police forensics go untried on that cold case and putative victims seem to lose peripheral vision so they can be easily attacked. The whole third act hobbled with implausible story beats and too many shrink-wrapped bodies to dispose of. Or is it the film that's been shrink-wrapped.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Film composer Yuri Habuka often sounds like she’s channeling Bernard Herrmann. Effective, but giving this suspenser Htchcockian overtones Kurosawa may not have been looking for.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Japan’s social conventions and physical restraint can look nearly as ‘off’ as the behavior of the film’s creepy villain. Which doesn’t hurt, as you might expect, but adds an extra note of complexity.
