London Film Festival 2012: The Samurai That Night Review

rating: 2.5

In The Samurai That Night, stage actor-director Masaaki Akahori directs his own play, though he appears to have done little to accommodate his work for the film medium. What begins promisingly dive-bombs in its awkward second half, due to an unsure tone and most of all, poor pacing, and far too many superfluous scenes which do little to move the otherwise engaging plot forward. This is not a film in which to expect too much subtlety; one of its first shots shows Ken (Masato Sakai) walking home from the shops with a large butcher knife piercing through his shopping bag; we know something is wrong. From here Akahori transports us to a dual perspective of sorts; first, we see the coming apart of Ken's life - whose wife is killed in a hit-and-run accident - as he stews in a void of his wife's clothes, eating nothing but custard and listening to her final voice-mail message ad infinitum. Meanwhile, the perpetrator of the cruelly banal hit-and-run is the cruel Kijima, a brief glimpse of the accident prefacing his contradictions as a person, keen to move past the accident but neither able nor keen to leave his violent life behind. Though there are laughs to be had in watching Ken hopelessly try to date other women, the piercing sadness of the piece is paramount; he is driven only by a series of letters he sends to Kijima, counting down the day he will brutally murder him, and then kill himself. It soon becomes clear, though, how integral romance is to what otherwise reads like a straight-forward, violent revenge thriller; an intermediary is driven to stop Ken's quest for blood, lining up women he hopes can make him happy again, even if seemingly to no avail. Demonstrating the film's sweet side, Ken shacks up with a hooker, though is so sullied by grief that he cannot perform physically, so spends the night eating junk food and watching her sing. At 119 minutes, the film does however feel a tad flabby and padded; one exchange in which Kijima steals a crossing guard's wallet before sexually accosting her feels entirely excessive, given our already crystal clear awareness that he is a violent, immoral thug. Though the scene is superbly played, it does ultimately feel pointless. The slow-burn pace of the second half also dilutes the impact of the overall package, and as we enter the hours prior to the inevitable showdown, suspense has near-enough evaporated. Part of the problem is the unease of tone; while the humour is initially agreeably idiosyncratic, it weighs things down by the end, such that the lazily conventional finale - a fight in the muddy rain - simply feels silly and toothless, a meek attempt to ape the hilariously over-long fight scenes of films like They Live. Still, there's little doubting that Sakai's central performance is very good; in fact, it feels somewhat wasted on an inconsistent film that doesn't quite know what it wants. While the ending leaves itself ambiguous in some areas while plainly resolute in others, the obnoxious - if memorable - final shot leaves things on something of a sour note after what could have been cathartic and sweetly thoughtful. Uneven, frustrating and occasionally brilliant, but unsatisfying overall.