Psychopaths and unresolved mysteries in a grim detective tale should be surefire material for someone like the prolific Kiyoshi Kurosawa to successfully tackle, right? Especially when you consider it’s adapted from a celebrated, award-winning novel. The Japanese director’s latest film was one of ten films we’re most excited about for Berlinale. Needless to say, I was very eager to watch Creepy. Alas, the film is an unfulfilling experience; incredulously dull, unwittingly absurd and comical, and featuring the most plank-like lead performance I’ve seen in quite some time.

After a psychotic incident almost kills him, detective Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) quits the force to teach criminal behavior and settle into his new home with doting wife Yasuko (Yuko Takeuchi). He randomly discovers an old unsolved case involving three missing people while Yasuko tries (and doesn’t stop trying…) to befriend their strange new neighbor, Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa). The parallel narratives converge, obviously. Nishijima plays detective Takakura with all human dimensions scraped off, leaving a vacuous non-person with the instincts of a blind wombat to handle a complex case and keep missing every red flag possible. It’s in Kagawa (reteaming with Kurosawa after Tokyo Sonata) where Creepy, appropriately, lives and breathes. His volatile, eccentric performance is the greatest joy in an otherwise detached, lethargic, and predictable picture.

It really shouldn’t be this easy to trivialize a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film. Even his misses (Journey To The Shore, Real…) usually have something exciting to latch onto. Perhaps he’s been working a little too much? Or his efforts were mostly concentrated on his upcoming Mathieu Amalric film The Woman in the Silver Plate? Either way, apart from a couple of neat camera movements where action is allowed to speak louder than words, Creepy is so disposable it hardly feels directed at all.

Rating:
5/10

Back in 1967 French filmmaker Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows, Day For Night) sat down with legendary director Alfred Hitchcock to discuss his filmmaking style and career up to that point. This new documentary from Kent Jones acts like a companion piece to the book Truffaut wrote from his interview, which includes several audio recordings from the actual interview. He also calls in several prominent directors such as; Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, David Fincher, and others who offer insight on the master of suspense’s work.

Hitchcock/Truffaut premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and recently at Telluride and TIFF, and will open in New York on December 2nd. If you consider yourself a film buff, or simply curious to what made Hitchcock so special, be sure to check out the trailer for Hitchcock/Truffaut.

There are missteps, and then there’s stepping off a cliff, and that distinction couldn’t be clearer while watching Journey to the Shore. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest film starts out as a sort of middle ground between his earlier genre films (Kairo, Cure) and the weighty drama he mastered in Tokyo Sonata before turning into a turgid mess. Over two hours in length, Journey to the Shore is, quite literally, all about the journey, which in this case feels like the slowest funeral march imaginable. It’s a film whose terrible qualities sting more than anything, since Kurosawa’s best days seem to be behind him. To say that he missed the mark with this film would be incorrect, because it would imply he was aiming at something to begin with.

At the very least, Kurosawa starts things off with a promising premise (he, along with co-writer Takashi Ujita, adapted the screenplay from a novel by Kazumi Yumoto): Piano teacher Mizuki (Eri Fukatsu) comes home to her apartment to find her husband Yusuke (Tadanobu Asano) literally appearing out of thin air while she does the dishes. Yusuke drowned in the ocean three years earlier, and despite his body never being found, there’s no plot twist or rational explanation here: Yusuke is 100% dead, his body devoured by crabs soon after he died. For some reason, his spirit has returned, looking and acting like any other human being, and he offers Mizuki the chance to go on a journey with him across the country. She accepts, and the film switches gears into an episodic narrative as they travel from one place to another, meeting people (including other normal-looking ghosts) that Yusuke has come to know in the years since his death.

This is where, despite my negativity towards the film (which comes from a place of disappointment more than anything), Journey to the Shore excels. There’s something bewildering and fascinating about the way Kurosawa creates a new mythology around death that fundamentally goes against all logic. Some dead people move on to the afterlife while others stay behind, living ordinary lives while fully aware of the fact that they’re a ghost. Mizuki and Yusuke’s first stop takes them to a village where they stay with Mr. Shimakage (Masao Komatsu), a newspaper distributor who used to employ Yusuke. He turns out to be a ghost too and eventually reveals a deep regret over mistreating his wife, presumed to be dead or long gone by now. The segment delves into themes of regret that come with the loss of a loved one, and Kurosawa ends his protagonists’ visit on an image that quickly changes from eerie to moving.

That scene doesn’t come close to matching what comes next, as the couple’s next stop finds them working at a small restaurant by the sea. There’s a self-contained sequence where Mizuki talks to the restaurant’s co-owner about a piano she keeps upstairs, and what follows is remarkable in the way Kurosawa’s framing, theatricality, and use of music coalesce into an emotionally charged moment that simultaneously evokes the pain of loss and the opportunity to move on from it. It’s a sequence that is, by far, the best thing Kurosawa has achieved in a long time, and a clear sign of the potential masterwork the film could have been.

But that’s only the first hour or so of Journey to the Shore, and for the next half, Kurosawa slowly dismantles everything he deftly establishes through the first two episodes. After a blowup between Mizuki and Yusuke reveals that things weren’t always perfect between the two, the film appears to reset itself, even going for the possibility of an “it was all a dream” explanation. There’s a brief detour, and then Yusuke magically reappears, whisking his wife off to a farm owned by yet another ghost. At this point, everything stalls, and the recurring link between guilt and mourning dissipate in favour of an attempt to add some sort of logic to the way death works in the film’s universe. It’s a classic case of ruining the mystery, and it’s absolutely unnecessary. The same goes for a subplot introduced about a couple going through a similar situation, except by the time this story resolves itself, it’s difficult to understand what exactly Kurosawa’s purpose might be. Or maybe it’s just that watching everything slowly fade into indiscernible white noise makes it impossible to care enough to try and figure it out.

And that’s why Journey to the Shore can feel so infuriating in how much it squanders the foundation it built. On a meta level, as a fan of Kurosawa, it’s easy to feel like the characters in this film at times— unable to accept that his ability to make genuinely great films has pretty much died. Watching Journey to the Shore is similar to watching an EKG machine show a few beeps before flatlining. I don’t want to say goodbye to Kurosawa, but like Mizuki, perhaps it’s time to finally let go.

The last day of TIFF was comprised of only one film for me, but its length could easily make up three separate movies. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Penance premiered on TV earlier this year as a 5 part miniseries, and now it’s been compiled into one long 270 minute experience. Kurosawa, who hasn’t made a film since 2008’s Tokyo Sonata, works well with the larger scale that comes with the television format even if it cant really break free from its origins (if you want to see a great example of a miniseries that’s beautifully cinematic check out the late Raul Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon). Penance‘s production values can be distracting at times, and it was clearly designed to be seen over a longer period of time instead of being played all at once.

The central character in Penance is Asako Adachi (Kyoko Koizumi), the wife of a successful businessman and stay at home mom for her daughter Emili. Emili and her friends Sae, Maki, Akiko and Yuko are playing together one day when a man asks Emili to help him. She goes with the man and is found dead hours later by her four friends. The four girls, despite seeing the killer’s face, refuse to give any details which fills Asako with fury as there are no other leads in the case. Asako tells the four girls that one day they will all have to do an act of penance she approves of if they won’t help her find the killer.

The first four episodes each focus on one of the girls 15 years in the future as they coincidentally start finding out what their atonement will be. Sae marries a young wealthy man only to become more of a prisoner than a wife. Maki, now a teacher, is consumed with guilt over Emili’s death and tries to redeem herself. Akiko is a shut-in who discovers a dark secret in her family, and Yuko obsesses over her brother-in-law. Each chapter operates as a stand-alone story, with Asako serving as the connective tissue. It comes as a surprise that these four segments are all consistently good. There’s a running theme involving the four women being oppressed either externally (usually a male villain) or internally (their remorse over Emili’s murder) which Kurosawa explores in various ways. The only exception would be Yuko who selfishly hurts the people around her with no sense of morals (this is also the lightest chapter, operating more as a dark comedy).

It’s unfortunate then that, after the first four engrossing chapters, the final act doesn’t stick the landing. The fifth chapter finally puts the focus on Asako as she hunts down her child’s killer to get revenge. While it wraps everything up in a nice bow, the answers are far from satisfying and end up making this the worst part of Penance. Plot twist after plot twist are thrown in until it feels like soap opera territory, and even during the climactic confrontation the pace started to drag. It’s an unsatisfying and cliched ending, but luckily the bulk of Penance is absorbing enough to make up for its shortcomings. Kurosawa still has a great eye, even with the murky look that dominates the majority of the film. All five leads do a great job with Koizumi being the obvious highlight along with Sakura Ando as Akiko. Penance is definitely a well-made film despite its flaws, but it should probably stay on smaller screens as good TV.

RATING: 7/10 (7.5 for chapters 1-4, 6 for chapter 5)

Penance

And with that, my TIFF coverage for 2012 ends. All in all it was a good experience, with 14* films seen in 7 days (not consecutively). Like every year, I usually end each festival waiting for next September to roll around so I can try to see even more films than before. Here’s hoping for a great TIFF 2013.

* Technically 15 but since I didn’t finish Spring Breakers I won’t count it

Recap of some of my Tweets from today:

Follow @WayTooIndie for full coverage of the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival!

Alright, PENANCE is about to begin. See you all in 5 hours #TIFF12

— Way Too Indie (@WayTooIndie) September 16, 2012

PENANCE: Engrossing but a flawed final act drags things down to soap opera territory. #TIFF12

— Way Too Indie (@WayTooIndie) September 16, 2012

It was a fun 4 hours and 47 minutes though!

— Way Too Indie (@WayTooIndie) September 16, 2012