3 out of 5

Directed by: Takashi Miike

There’s a lot to appreciate in Rainy Dog as a Miike career note – its wonderfully subdued score; the patience of the held shots; the somewhat frustrating reserve of the script really helping to sell the conclusion – but there’s an equal amount that’s middling, from its surface level themes to its undercooked characters.  It’s also somewhat lacking in the editing cues / cuts that normally signal a Takashi project; in looking to turn a basic plot into something more complex, I can imagine Miike figuring that a minimalist one would be the best approach for his visuals, but it ends up looking very much like a ‘regular’ film as a result, which thus doesn’t assist in at all masking the genericness of its yakuza-lite redemption tale.

Show Aikawa plays Yuuji, a recently free-agented hitman, whose day hits a snag when he’s suddenly stuck with a mute youngster following him around, told that said kid is the fruit of his loins from a past dalliance.  While Yuuji’s preamble is a bit “here’s the message of the film” stilted, these initial moments are fascinating in their terse minimalism: Yuuji hardly acknowledges the kid, and continues on his way to a job without looking back to note that the boy is following dutifully behind him.

So it goes, with a pause for Yuuji to hint – again, very stilted and forced – that he’s starting to care about the boy.  Also, that the omnipresent rain sucks.

Eventually, a hit brings the target’s brother to town, thirsty for revenge, which swirls around a low-stakes cat-and-mouse for the film’s latter half, Yuuji having picked up a surrogate mum for the boy (a prostitute, also lamenting the rain and questing for freedom from her daily toils…) along the way.

My tonal snark here is strictly regarding the plot: while the core of many a Miike movie may not step far off of well-trodden paths, he normally finds an especially effective way of representing the tale; that the only real dialogue / narration we get here is of such a “duh, spell it out for me” variety is a strange bummer.  Beneath the surface, I’d hazard that there’s a meta debate for Takashi as to whether or not to give in to his thematic demons of father-and-son tales, something that would seem baked in to Rainy Dog but that Miike avoids sentimentalizing at every opportunity: the boy is left in Yuuji’s wake most of the way.  While this robs the flick of emotional attachment and somewhat trivializes the ending, it indirectly underlines the film’s (arguably) secondary theme of inescapable cycles.  Which is brilliantly driven home by the very Miike final beats.

So stepping away from Rainy Dog as a film with a story, and watching it more as a filmmaker’s contemplation on, like, filmmaking, it’s sincerely rather gripping.  The juxtaposition of what we’re told is happening with the restraint of the visuals is fascinating, in a similar way that the downbeat, nigh-Western score is suggestive of a journey whilst we’re never moving.  Show’s sixth-sense glance-and-then-glance-back looks throughout, besides being sort of his trademark look, again underline this feeling like we’re forgetting something… we’re forgetting it’s a yakuza movie, or we’re forgetting it’s a drama, or etc.

And I’m sure I’m reaching, but regardless, there’s something that keeps us watching, even as another dull line of eye-rolling dialogue thumps through the speakers.

A more aggressive analysis might consider this flick’s place in the Black Society trilogy of which its the second, or could further pair it off against the later (and similarly subvertingly subdued Dead or Alive 2), but I’ll leave that to folks like Tom Mes and just make my own speculations.  I first watched Rainy Dog way back when I’d seen very few Miike films and it, admittedly, didn’t make much impact.  Which I get, now, as its lacking in a lot of clear signposts the director normally establishes.  But it’s intriguing for that same reason, and the intentionality of that avoidance gives the film its slightly off quality that I think makes it interesting even without a Miike affinity.