2 out of 5

Directed by: Takashi Miike

It is absolutely bizarre to me that Takashi Miike’s movies of – from the time of this review – the past fifteen years or so still get comparisons to his hits of a relative twenty years ago, in a framing of those older films being the defining style for the director, then in the same sentence / breath trotting out the “he’s made 100+ movies” line. ‘Bizarre’ is somewhat hyperbole if applied overall; I realize that more casual filmgoers may’ve just seen those hits, know that 100+ tagline (which I’ve admittedly used as well), and draw some circle around it which suggests that all of Miike’s movies are Audition or Ichi the Killer riffs. But I’m more taking this skeptical stance when it comes to reviewers from notable sites / publications, or even those dedicated to Asian cinema: yes, there are extremes in the filmmaker’s career, and it’s not (by the numbers) wrong to point to many of those extremes from earlier in Miike’s oeuvre. …But that’s exactly the point: he started out by splattering his style all around V-cinema – though even then, if you splay out the whole run, there’s a marked amount of stylistic / tonal diversity – and then Audition was a point of shifting focuses, happening alongside shifts in the Japanese movie industry. Thanks to props from Quentin Tarantino and shows like Masters of Horror, Takashi retained a sort of notoriety, but – if I’m not already an asshole, here’s where I’ll get to sound especially like one – if you actually watched a good chunk of his output post-Audition, you can see how Miike spreads out even further, to the experimental, or reconfigurations of the once reliable yakuza genre. Getting into modern streaming cinema and blockbuster-only theater experiences, we see a lot of tokusatsu TV work, mixed with notable anime / manga adaptations, some franchise work, and sneaked in… some darker pieces. And so Lumberjack the Monster – one of these darker pieces – comes along, and we jump right back to “the director of Audition is at it again.”

Rant over, except in how it’ll tie into my actual review, which starts now.

Lumberjack the Monster is, ultimately, a high-concept, low-execution affair. This is meant mainly in terms of its story, but it could also be applied to its style, which feels half-conceived, sticking to the crisp and calculated cinematography of Nobuyasu Kita (a now longtime Miike companion from the latter 00s onward) and employing some masterful framing / staging control, but also coming across as unenergetic at key points. There’s a part of me that wants to get meta, and attribute this to the personalities being “studied” in the movie, but given that that study is very shallow, I can’t get too far with that justification.

Those studies relate to high-powered lawyer and self-proclaimed psychopath, Akira (Kazuya Kamenashi), both “professions” which we never really get to witness in the movie, except an opening kill which somewhat ‘correctly’ positions Akira’s psychopathy as self-serving, versus his “friend” and fellow self-proclaimed psychopath, doctor Sugitani (Shota Sometani), who moreso fits the cinematic styling of the term via his delight in experimentation / killing that may or may not be involved with his career. …Typing this out, there may be more to the meta than I realize, as we’re playing with character tropes here that never really manifest visually on screen – which could be toying with our expectations of either Miike or exploitation movies in general – but I still think any attempts at something more heightened like that are ultimately limited by the screenplay.

The other overlay here is when Akira finds himself stalked by a mask-wearing, axe-wielding murderer who appears to be styled after the titular character from a storybook; after a knock on the noggin put him in hospital, Akira is told there’s a mood-affecting neurochip implanted in his brain – a practice outlawed years ago – and there becomes a dual drive to discovering who this mask-wearing foe is, as well as understanding more about this neurochip. But the noggin-knock may have had an additional effect: emotions start to seep in to Akira’s decision making.

While the movie plays at being a detective yarn – somewhat connecting us to Laplace’s Witch, with an additional possible plot nod to Lesson of the Evil – allowing for variations on quirky cop tropes via profiler Toshiro (Nanao) and disgraced copper Inui (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) – this is entirely wheel-spinning, as there’s very little mystery when you have a core cast of only a few, and most of the background can be pieced together from an initial flashback plus the neurochip detail. This ultimately leads to the conflict between stories that gives the movie an undercurrent of laziness: the script itself is very straight-forward in taking us from introducing Akira, to the chip, to the hunt for this Lumberjack character, and their reveal; there’s some style in executing that but not much passion – action is missing a bit of the Miike looseness, and has a one-take-is-probably-enough practice vibe – and the direct story beats are appended not by the emotional / atmospheric cutaways the director typical employs, but rather wholly unnecessary flashbacks to things said only a few minutes ago, a type of hand-holding more typical of watered down blockbusters. But: the hour or so after Akira’s attack is masterful: an emotional cat and mouse between Toshiro and Akira, and Akira’s cat and mouse with himself, coming to terms with his shifting brain chemistry. Nanao and Kamenashi are quite phenomenal here, and this is also where the visuals feel most tightly controlled, cast in sterile whites and with fantastically blocked, static shots or paced camera sweeps. That seems like the movie Miike maybe wanted to make, and it got imperfectly stitched to something a bit more typical, which could’ve been fun if made more indulgent… but was tempered to attempt to fit it with the other stuff.

As a last “it almost worked” note, the score from Koji Endo had some Yamaoka vibes, which were fitting, but I was more fascinated by some moments where the score ‘breaks’ – when the tone of a scene is purposefully interrupted, and the score stutters. This really worked well in the opening, and then became kind of clunkily used later on. There’s some kind of summary about the film itself within that as well.