Film Reviews

Cold Fish

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Megumi Kagurazaka
• Details: Japan / 144mins (18).

Although based on the true story of Japan's most notorious serial killer and boasts buckets of blood and dismembered bodies, Cold Fish doesn't go down the usual police procedural thriller road - it takes the bizarro road instead. Mixing the banal with the barmy, this one doesn't always work but its dark sense of humour and copious amounts of violence will keep you watching.
Shamoto (Fukikoshi) is a meek tropical fish shop owner who lets his rebellious daughter (Hikari Kajiwara) do what she wants while his second wife (Kagurazaka) rejects his advances. One night, Shamoto runs into the gregarious Murata (Denden) who invites him back to his own expansive tropical fish shop and proposes that Shamoto's wayward daughter should work for him to put her on the straight and narrow. Shamoto is bullied by his family into accepting Muratu's offer of becoming his business partner and immediately regrets after witnessing Muratu coldly offing his previous business partner right in front of him. And the killing doesn't stop there...
It's slow to kick off, which allows Shion Sono to hoodwink the audience into thinking they're watching some kind of family drama, before the writer-director unleashes the raw carnage. And then he unleashes some more just in case you missed it the first time. Blood and guts become the order of the day as the real nature of the increasingly unhinged Muratu, and his equally nutty wife (Asuka Kurosawa), become clear. Being dragged from pillar to post genre-wise can be fun but it can also be confusing as thoughts like 'why is X happening?' won't go away. The best advice is to run with it and let Sono take you into this crazy world so madcap that the director is forced to include dates and times to remind one that this, or a version of this, actually happened.
At almost two-and-a-half hours Cold Fish is far too long for what it is and doesn't have the story to warrant the self-indulgent running time. That said, the explosive and unexpected ending is worth sticking around for, as the story finally succumbs to what it had been threatening to do throughout: going totally off the reservation.

Review by Gavin Burke