When a serial killer starts murdering young woman at 6 PM every Monday night in the Tokyo subways, police psychologist Setsuko Suma (Kaho Minami) is called in to investigate. An unorthodox detective, Suma has the odd gift of being able to see the last thing her victims saw before their demise—an ability that eventually leads her to suspect that her ex lover Dr. Rei Aku (Takeshi Wakamatsu), a man who makes his living reprogramming the brains of cult members, may be behind the crimes. The investigation will put the young detective in grave danger—and lead to a climax that is confounding yet oddly satisfying at the same time.

I’d be a liar if I told you that I understood everything that was going on in Angel Dust. Director Sogo Ishii has crafted a film that thrives on ambiguity, and that clearly loses something in the translation from its original Japanese to English. And yet, while the majority of thrillers would be complete failures if the plot was lost in the translation, Angel Dust bucks the trend thanks in no small part of the lush visual style created by Ishii and cinematographer Norimichi Yasamatsu.

In many ways, the film bears an almost striking resemblance to the work of Italian horror and thriller specialist Dario Argento. The production is highly stylized, featuring a wide variety of shots, cuts, and extended scenes that are simply masterful in terms of aesthetic design. Ishii moves the camera with a quiet confidence, lingering when necessary, and flitting about when it suits the needs of a particular scene. In this regard, the camera is almost a character in its own right—an extension of Suma’s own awareness of her surroundings.

What Angel Dust doesn’t have that is so common in Argento’s cinema of the macabre is a copious amount of violence. Ishii’s film is content to keep all the violence to a complete minimum, allowing the viewer to fill in the blanks mentally. Given that the murders in the film are all injection-oriented, this isn’t a bad idea.

The plot is inspired by an interesting mélange of sources—from Silence of the Lambs to the real-life sarin gas attack on a Japanese subway by cult members that occurred in the 1990s. Ishii takes these influences and merges them into a sort of hyper-stylized and incredibly surreal narrative that is best described as dreamlike. The dream motif continues throughout the film—from the oddly ethereal plot structure through to Suma’s own ‘awakening’ that spurs on the climax. While the film has its share of faults, thematic cohesiveness isn’t one of them.

The performances are also worthy of mention, particularly those of Wakamatsu and Minami. There’s a Lecter/Starling dynamic at work in this twisted relationship, and thanks to the acting talents of the two leads, it works just as well (and in some cases, better) than the bigger budgeted Hollywood project. Ishii and screenwriter Yorozu Ikuta seem interested in taking things much further than Demme and company did in the adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel. The end result is a gut-wrenching climax that goes to depths only dreamed of in Silence of the Lambs.

Ultimately, Angel Dust is a flawed film. The stylish visual presentation does its best to make up for a rather convoluted and confusing plot, and generally succeeds. However, at least part of the problem with the film’s narrative must be traced back to its translation from Japanese to English. The film’s subtitles are atrocious grammatically, and it’s easy to imagine that a great deal of the film’s nuance was lost in the translation. Despite this, the film is still worth a look for fans of Japanese cinema. I’ve no doubt that given Hollywood’s current infatuation with remaking all things Japanese, we’ll probably be seeing an American version of this film at some point in the not too distant future.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day