Yoshihiro Nishimura
Tokyo Gore Police

What is a "contemporary"? Someone we would like to kill without knowing quite how. (Emil Cioran)

Elevating such a maligned genre as the splatter movie to these levels is an extraordinary feat. We are faced with a work of art of surprising intensity... a film to watch twice: first alone, immersed in silence and without annoying friends around. Then in company.

We find ourselves in a hypothetical future with some slightly cyberpunk hues where the Tokyo police have been privatized (something that almost happened in Japan) and now has massive power comparable to that of Judge Dredd. Wearing armor similar to that of feudal Japan, the new Tokyo police must face the Engineers as their main threat — genetically modified serial killers capable of regenerating their mutilated body parts, turning them into formidable weapons. The story's protagonist is Ruka, the best engineer hunter around.

It's a film that does not take itself too seriously and manages to offer extremely amusing moments but the tendency to turn every situation into a spectacle prevents it from achieving more ambitious artistic goals which were within its reach given the exceptional direction. Despite the plot being little more than a pretext to stage "the big show," Tokyo Gore Police is by no means devoid of content: I found the critique of a contemporary society increasingly tending towards dehumanization quite valid even in its burlesque tones. In the film, crime seems to have decreased almost by 100%. Massive propaganda justifies, sponsors, and promotes police actions but simultaneously suicides have increased dramatically and cutting weapons are being sold, advertised on television where death has never been so cool. As Wilde said: "we are punished for what we deny ourselves: every impulse we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us." Thus, social repression yields counterproductive effects because it leads to implosion and explosion in the most aberrant forms of all those human urges that find no possibility of expression.

I do not think there exist other splatters that can boast such an immersive experience and such a profound scenic setup, not to mention its richness of suggestion. From this perspective, the film went far beyond my most optimistic expectations. Playing the lead role, we have Eihi Shiina (the legendary star of Audition for those who need context) who, besides being enormously talented, is quite a knockout with a capital G. Thanks to her, Ruka seems literally ripped from the pages of a Japanese manga: she is a highly visionary character with an unflappable beauty even amidst gallons of blood. An authentic feminine aesthetic ideal with a very incisive strength of character. Nothing to do with those vapid American femme fatales, the silly girls who play serious in sterile roles.

Unfortunately, after three quarters of viewing, the limits of the narrative structure start to show; the film, which up to that point enjoyed perfect narrative timing and captivating atmosphere, devolves into pure splatter and moves towards mere entertainment with a fairly predictable conclusive twist. It loses some momentum in the end, but it remains a great comic-book-style film with high-class stylistic touches and phenomenal gems.

Awarded Best Film at the Fant-Asia Film Festival in Montreal in 2008.