Let’s face it: there are some films you watch primarily if not entirely just so you can say “I saw that film with… that title”. This is surely one of those films, I will confess the title was certainly what drew me at first… director Atsushi Yamatoya had been a screenwriter at Nikkatsu before he went independent, and one of his efforts had been Seijun Suzuki’s infamous Branded to Kill just a few months earlier; this fact made sense while watching ISDW (let’s just abbreviate it), cos on some level you can kind of see this one as being like that except more fucked. It’s considered an early pink film, a genre with no real Western equivalent but this particular example could probably be compared to the “roughies” being made in the US at the same time, but sex isn’t really what drives this film (unlike what I’ve always assumed about the pink genre, with which I’m only really theoretically familiar)… plot revolves around a hitman, Sho, who’s been hired by a real estate developer, Naka, to take out a yakuza gang who have kidnapped his mistress; the leader of said gang also killed Sho’s girlfriend years earlier. Beyond that broad outline… I’m not 100% sure, to be honest; Yamatoya is frankly uninterested is making things easy for the viewer, and I often found myself confused by the timeline being presented. The longer it goes on, the harder it gets to tell what’s happening now, what’s a flashback, and what might just be imaginary (it’s clearer by the end, but the last half hour or so is kind of hard going). ISDW is nothing if not wilfully difficult, but it’s also fascinating and compelling enough to keep watching, and I think it’ll reward rewatches in future.
You must be logged in to post a comment.