I've been watching Japanese cinema for a while, including 80s Kadokawa films. It took years for me to find this movie with English subtitles but I finally did it. So I sat down and watched the movie. I don't want to give a synopsis of the movie, I just wanted to tell you what I thought and let you watch the movie on your own.
I really like the dynamic between the characters and their dialogue. At one minute you will like a character, the next minute you will hate their guts, and slowly you will start to respect them again while they have some kind of redemption. I like the characters, the cinematography, the use of sound, lighting, but I didn't like the plot. It wasn't really going anywhere. You were just watching people spiral out of control with no pathway to get onto. I find that a good movie has a set goal in mind, or it sets up goals to achieve as the movie goes forward (like one goal gets achieved but a new problem arises.) In this movie, life kind of keeps moving with no motivation to go anywhere. The only progression through the movie is time, not achievements. There is nothing that you desire to happen, you just hope things don't go wrong for the main character. And that is basically the only thing that keeps you engaged throughout the movie.
This movie is very negative in tone, which I'm okay with, you have to expect that with Japanese films, but there was almost nothing positive. Once you give the audience an emotional attachment to a character, you can break their heart but letting something bad happen to the character. But you can't keep torturing the character in front of the audience with one scene after another, or else they will get emotionally tired. I won't spoil the ending but by the end, my emotional stamina was done, I didn't care what happened to the main character because I had lost the power to care. You need to have in between scenes where you're character succeeds, or just has a little bit of fun. There are probably only a total of 3 minutes of those kinds of scenes throughout the 130 minute movie. If you have those fun scenes, your audience's "emotional battery" will almost charge up, and they will be able to take another devastating hit. Those fun scenes are very crucial for balance but they just were not in this movie.
I liked how the movie didn't explain much and you were left to wonder how characters are related to each other. Making your own predictions on how things led up to the train wreck in front of you. And after more conversations between the characters, you come to understand more. This is something that I always liked about Japanese film. It is something that you inspect, instead of something that feeds you.
Overall, I think it was fun to watch the interactions of the characters, no matter how negative. But it would be insanely difficult to re-watch because there is no real "progression" in the movie besides time.
