Retribution (2006)

From acclaimed director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (PULSE and CURE), RETRIBUTION was a film festival favorite, named the "Official Selection" of the New York Asian Film Festival, FantAsia Film Festival and the Fantastic Fest. Detective Yoshioka is investigating the drowning death of a young woman in a red dress. Lying face down in a muddy puddle, her stomach is found to be full of sea water. As the investigation progresses, clues begin to appear that point to him being the murderer - as his fingerprints are found on the body and some of his personal items are found at the murder scene. As more bodies turn up, killed in the same way, even the detective begins to wonder whether he may be the very murderer that he is pursuing.

Audiences Are Getting More and More Stupid By the Day

A detective (Koji Yakusho) investigates a series of murders by drowning, while at the same time questioning his own possible involvement. Like his last movie (Loft), Kiyoshi Kurosawa focuses mostly on the concept of memory. This time, however, the consequences that lie behind the motive for the killings reach far beyond the primary characters. The horror sequences themselves are nicely done and incorporate a variety of techniques. The pacing is glacial but there's more than enough here to satisfy.

Reading some of the negative reviews on IMDb only confirms that audiences are getting more and more stupid by the day. No doubt this is due to the endless flooding of Hollywood movies (if you really want to call them "movies") that are made for brainless halfwits who have completely abandoned their cerebral skills in favor of special effects and potty humor. That said, one can only shrug their shoulders at the mass of confusion expressed by some of the reviewers here who claim that this film "doesn't make a lick of sense." Allow me to explain.

START OF SPOILERS

The woman in red is behind every killing that occurs. The murders that the detective is investigating were committed by people, but the woman in red influenced them to kill because they experienced the same rejection that she experienced - they are not an integral part of the future of their loved ones. The detective is the only one who is forgiven, but the rest of the world must die, because she was abandoned by all. Therefore, her influence over the human murderers was simply a foreshadowing of the apocalyptic doom that would later befall the entirety of humanity.

END OF SPOILERS

There are more specifics to the story, of course, but the synopsis above is rather simplistic and shouldn't be all that difficult to understand. Then again, if someone feeds their brain with dim-witted tripe like Friday the 13th and Hostel all the time, it's possible that their movie IQ has degraded to such an extent that even the slightest bit of indirect communication by a filmmaker will go unnoticed. For those of us who don't need (or simply don't want) everything spelled out in BIG RED LETTERS, Retribution offers a bit of interest.

The rest of you Hollywood fanboys may as well not even bother with stuff like this. Just go and watch Freddy vs. Jason or Alien vs. Predator a few hundred more times until your brain turns into a quivering mound of jello. May 7, 2008

Be good, policeman!

A sound departure from usually over-sexy stories from Japan mixes murdering with mystics, adding a little to a Kurosawa's legacy in world cinematography. May 7, 2008

Evident post-production tinkering (or pre-International release bargaining) compromises otherwise interesting film.

I can't believe that Kurosawa would be happy with the ending of this film as it appears on the North American dvd release, and can't help thinking that he was either forced into it or that someone else did it for him. There's a shock scare and a bit of voice over at the very end that are completely out of keeping with the rest of the movie, don't play by the internal rules of the haunting, and smack heavily of money men mixing in in an attempt to make the film more commercial. The ironic thing is that it's too little too late, and the incongruous elements only serve to take some of the glow off of what would have been a very neat little movie indeed if it had ended a scene and a half earlier.

It's still the most interesting Japanese film I've seen this year, but for Kurosawa fans it's definitely going to feel compromised. Makes me wonder what the Japanese release print looks like, or, if it's the same as this one, what a director's cut would look like. April 19, 2008

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