If it’s a really, really bad time at the movies that you’re after – and many are! – then you could do a lot worse than seeing Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s French-language remake of his own 1998 film about grieving father Albert (Damien Bonnard) who will stop at nothing to find those responsible for the murder and mutilation of his eight-year-old daughter. By strange quirk, he’s joined by Japanese psychotherapist Sayoko (Ko Shibasaki), who is blindly but fervently assisting him in his operation which involves capturing and torturing the employees and associates of a shady corporation called Minard.
It initially feels like Kurosawa’s own take on the beloved Saw franchise, in which hapless victims are under the gun to come up with answers to obscure questions. Yet this is a more tricksy and conceptual work, and after a while, the film begins to hint that it might be Sayoko at the centre of this elaborate ploy, and Albert may just be her gormless patsy.
An intriguing subplot sees Sayoko attempt to prescribe medication to a suicidal patient, who returns to her saying that her prescription did noting. In his search for answers, Albert is like a patient passing through the metaphorical trial-and-error gauntlet of soothing balms, placebos and heavy duty tranquillisers, plucking out his next target to see if they contain some special ingredient to cure what ails him. Sayoko, meanwhile, is revealed as a master manipulator, apparently overseeing a violent role-playing therapy session in which Albert is allowed to find his man, whomever they may be.
Mathieu Amalric, Grégoire Colin and Slimane Dazi turn up as the victims who will do or say anything to save their own keisters. Yet the more information they reveal, the more we have a sense of what Minard were really up to, and that’s when the film takes a turn for the desperately grim. Kurosawa is not usually known for his overt sense of humour, but there’s certainly a sense that he is the Mabuse-like figure who is manipulating things from out of frame, sending the audience on this wild goose chase while making sure the discomfort quotient remains high, high, high.
Despite a couple of shootings and taserings, there’s very little actual violence depicted on screen, yet Kurosawa leaves all that for the imagination, particularly in the monologue Albert regularly repeats to his captives in which he reads out verbatim the coroner’s report of his dead daughter. It’s a singularly dismal affair, one that sits in a necessarily uncomfortable place between genre thriller and arthouse doodle. But this is another intriguing exercise in cultivating a tone of extreme unease and just sustaining it until the credits roll.
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