Rape revenge flick is just so quirky I don't even know what I thought of it.
Half way through this I found myself wondering what genre it was. Was it a horror? No, because it wasn't gruesome or scary enough. Was it a drama? No, because there was nowhere near enough depth to the story. Was it a thriller? No, because there was hardly any sense of thrills or tension on display.
This stumbling block is always going to be a huge problem. If you cannot classify a story under a specific category, or indeed multiple ones, then it becomes very hard to understand what kind of mindset to watch it in. If it's a thriller then it gets your pulse racing and you instantly 'activate' the mental recesses to put you into that frame of mind so you'll get the most out of it. Likewise horror, and one prepares oneself to be scared or disgusted or whatever. It's like real life - you're not going to elicit any inappropriate emotion for a given situation. You want to panic when you're being chased by a lion, not when you're settling down for a relaxing evening with your wife/husband.
With this, I was simply baffled as to how to feel.
Chihiro is a young lady who appears to have it all; a good job, an impending marriage to a man she's deeply in love with, and a solid social circle of friends. Indeed, she's in absolute bliss.
However, when a man she seems to recognise shows up at her apartment block, she runs from him in a state of panic, and a flashback of a scene from a home movie where the man's eyes dominate the picture appears. Evidently, she knows this man, and is terrified of him. Running back to her apartment she tries to get away from him, but he sticks to her like glue and takes over her home.
Essentially, it's safe to say that he (Kojima) is someone from Chohiro's past who she hoped never to see again.
That would be a synopsis and sets the stall for the movie. Well, so you would think. The problem I have with this review is the movie has very little content. Basically rapist #1 shows up, gets killed by the vilified woman, then his buddy shows up and the same happens, then the last one. And to store the bodies of these perps? Chohiro buys industrial freezers.
And that's it.
Obviously, there's an ending here, but you can see it coming a mile off and the events leading up to it are also as inevitable.
The major flaw with this movie is there are simply no layers to it. It's uninteresting because it never makes anything happen.
There's just so little plot that it makes rating it impossible, plus the added fact that it even adopts comedy at one point shows how completely directionless it actually is.
It's shallow, vacuous, and devoid of meat. However, it *is* different, and is extremely quirky as a result, which I must give it credit for.
However, add some overwrought rape scenes to the mix and you finish this movie entirely confused as to what you made of it.
I think more could have been done with the idea, and plenty more to make it plausible. Which is another flaw; to say you have to suspend your disbelief is an understatement. It's just absolutely incredible how daft much of this is. So many things happen which seem to abandon logic entirely, and they don't even succeed in entertaining given how utterly daft they are. You find yourself asking just why she is acting the way she is, why she is doing what she is doing.
Is it entertaining? Dunno. I suppose it killed (pardon the pun) a couple of hours but really, it was just so narrow.
Strange.
