1 out of 5

Director: Shion Sono

This is my first Sono film. After a good review on Bloody Disgusting, I was pretty excited. And… meh. So: strike one is our age-old ‘inspired by a true story’ tag. Even though the reality is far away from what’s portrayed here, for a director obviously aiming for visual overkill, it seems a silly and dated move, one that worked well for Texas Chainsaw Massacre but has seemed like a hackneyed attempt for quite some time now. Fine. Moving past that, we get a great staccato beginning, a Japanese housewife shopping and chopping up dinner for her husband and stepdaughter. But then, y’know, that’s over, and the film goes from hiccup to hiccup, introducing us to Murata, a boisterous tropical fish dealer who also is apparently a killer, taking the submissive Shamoto under his wing in a frenzied 145 minute mess of ‘commentary’ on family, or desire, or maybe gender roles, or maybe something else. It doesn’t matter. This is art school pap, being good with a camera and thinking that two people wrestling in offal is automatically disturbing or “clever” when, without any real connection to the scene for the viewer, it’s just boring. “Cold Fish,” for me, was defined by a scene where the lead – and spoiler alert – switches quickly from submissive hubbie to sadistic depressive and attacks his wife, slapping her and then saying “I’m going to rape you.” Why say it? We can see it. It was an example of many in the film of a lack of marriage between script and screen, and an inability to layer things so that they’re actually effective. By the time we get to our overwrought conclusion, you don’t care. You never do. Sono has a good sense of framing, and the music is generally juxtaposed well with the scenes. The colors work. And perhaps his earlier films work in the way this one doesn’t, one day I’ll see. But Cold Fish accomplishes nothing, says nothing, and goes nowhere that other films haven’t already gone.