Police investigate
two cases, a young woman who has stabbed herself to death and a
married man who has done the same. To Detective Sekiya the verdict
is clear: suicide. Detective Kirishima isn't so sure. Shortly
before their deaths both had called someone named '0'. The dead
man's wife says that he was screaming for help in his sleep even as
his arm, puppetlike, plunged a boxcutter at himself. The police
chief decides that a psychic should be brought in to help locate '0'.
That psychic is
Kagenuma, with the ability to enter other people's dreams. Kagenuma
has never had a happy life. His mother feared and rejected him for
his psychic gift. When he uses it, he sees nothing but other
people's pain, their miseries, the darkest forgotten secrets that
misshape their psyches. They come to him begging for his help, then
resent him for what comes of it after he has endured their
nightmares. Kagenuma would like for himself nothing better than
oblivion and an escape from the company of others.
Writer/director
Shinya Tsukamoto has explored a number of disparate ideas over the
course of his career, and now with his ninth feature release he draws
most of them together in one film. Alienation and the deadening of
the spirit have been a constant theme throughout his oeuvre, and
suicide particular to Bullet Ballet and Vital (Vital especially
explored the idea of suicide pacts). In recent films Tsukamoto's
gaze had turned from the body itself to the inner essence (Vital,
Haze). Suppression of memory to blot out pain was key to Vital and
Haze both. ESP and the idea of shared psychic space between people
(that is, people visiting each other's subconscious minds) appeared
in Tetsuo: the Iron Man and resurfaced in Vital.
Tsukamoto himself
plays '0', a more or less direct continuation of the morphing
antagonist of Tetsuo and Tetsuo II, the man who has gone from seeking
the destruction of his self to a perverse joy in the destruction of
everyone and everything around him. '0' also is the more malevolent
reflection of the instigator he played in A Snake of June.
Tsukamoto's films
have a history of showcasing strong female characters. Those
sensibilities are again put forward in Keiko Kirishima, the detective
who presses Kagenuma to get involved in the case. She is new to the
force, having been stationed a desk job with the police before now.
Seeing her first dead bodies she has a hard time with the bloody
aftermath. In a Tsukamoto film, squeamishness is a device like
glasses were for Hitchcock: in the master's movies the wearing of
glasses signified faulty moral vision. For tsukamoto, an inability
to deal with blood, decay, etc. means a character who is not fully in
touch with nature and often blind to something important in the
story. Kirishima says that she asked for a transfer because she
wants to do work that is more substantial, but we will learn later
that it is more likely that an inner drive is seeking closer
proximity with violence and death. Privately, Kirishima has been
having her own series of nightmares in which she meets a wilder
version of herself.
All of this echoes
the female protagonists of Tokyo Fist (Hizuru discovers her inner
fury), A Snake of June (Rinko hides her true essence from herself),
and Bullet Ballet (Chisato lives on the edge in search of
self-destruction). And that brings us to the major problem with
Nightmare Detective: Kirishima, not Kagenuma, is the central
character here but she does not live up to Tsukamoto's heroines of
his past efforts. Those characters were more fully developed and
played by vibrant actresses. We've seen the likes before. The female
cop who has to work harder than everyone else to prove herself equal
to the men. Sad to say it's true to life, so the problem isn;t one
of credibility. Unfortunately it's overly familiar – a cliché.
Coming from a director renowned for his wild imagination establishes
the movie on a disconcerting note. Compounding the problem,
Ysukamoto has cast pop singer Hitomi in the lead, a decent actress of
limited experience and without the range of his previous lead
actresses. Kirishima doesn't resonate like Rinko, Hizumi, or
Chisato.
I blame the
premise of the movie. In tying together so much of his past work in
one movie, this should be the Tsukamoto film to end them all, his
crowning achievement. It is a good film, yet in sum it ends up
one of his slighter works even as he brings his disparate strands
together in one uniform piece. Weakening the piece substantially,
these themes don't make themselves plain until late in the movie. In
order to bring the audience to that point, Tsukamoto must take pains
to build and support his premise. That takes the form of a standard
police procedural, nothing like the fresh original storytelling the
director is known for. We've seen criminal investigation movies of
this flavor before, and coming from Tsukamoto it feels impersonal and
uninspired. Nightmare Detective takes patience and probably multiple
viewings before you see the real Tsukamoto in it. I didn't until I
watched and reviewed his films in chronological order.
You can catch some
sense of the director in the camera movements, like the nervous
handheld shots. Here too, though, Tsukamoto departs from his usual
tendencies. While he's still experimenting, true to his nature, this
time his use of colors employs not gels and filters but digital
manipulation with color timing and desaturation. Tokyo no longer
seems a cold, sterile place to live, just another urban center with
an alluring night presence. Chu Ishikawa tones it down as well,
where an emotional montage is informed not by the director’s
favored composer but by Erik Satie's Gymnopaedia.
I've always been
fascinated by dreams and the dream experience, and the difficulty in
recreating that experience on screen. Most directors fail – hell,
most don't even try. I suspect they have never spent a moment
recalling their own dreams, falling back on popular misconceptions
(fill the screen with extravagant visuals, et voila). Have you ever
noticed how in dreams you often know intuitively what a thing,
person, or creature looks like even though you never actually see
them? How would you convey that in a movie without heavy expositive
dialog? In Nightmare Detective Tsukamoto has come close by creating
elaborate nightmare creatures and then not letting us have more than
shaky glimpses of what they might be.
Repeating another
motif of late is imagery of life in water, both fish and microscopic.
In Nightmare Detective, water indicates the organic boundaries
between the physical and spiritual, and between one consciousness and
another. Kagenuma descends in and out of dreamastates and others'
selves by sinking onto the keel of a sunken ship. We also see
imagery of fish and microscopic life.
Preparing to enter
someone else's dream state, Kagenuma dresses in a rain slicker, and
beneath that pants and shoes he can easily slip out of. It's a
psychological trick, helping him find the right mental state by
shedding encumbrances. The rain slicker looks a bit like a cape –
echoing the visual cue from M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable but much
more amusing as a jab at superhero costumes.
Tsukamoto can also
be found in a visual motif that recurs from Vital, an act of mutual
asphyxiation between two characters seeking oblivion together. This
is not erotic asphyxiation, but shared hopelessness. Both films trade
in depression without solving it. In Nightmare Detective, one
character finds his depression linked to a buried childhood trauma
while another who suffers looks into her own past and finds abundant
joy. How did they both end up in the same place? It's the mystery
that preoccupies Tsukamoto's movie.
Nightmare
Detective is the first in a trilogy proposed by Shinya Tsukamoto. To
date he has yet to begin production on the third film.
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