Three Films Make A Post: A tale of the strange and perverse.

G@me (2003): Supposed to be a twisty crime thriller with some satirical elements, Satoshi Isaka’s adaptation of a novel by Keigo Higashino (that may very well be much better) is exactly the sort of thing that gives twist-based movies a bad name: as is oh so typical the plot twists manage to be completely obvious to anyone who has seen a couple of movies yet also make a mockery out of the characters’ behaviour the audience has witnessed throughout. It doesn’t help that we spend our time with two characters (as played by Naohito Fujiki and Yukie Nakama’s respective hair-dos) who are at once deeply unlikeable and terribly boring, nor that their attempts at faking a kidnapping really rather belong in a Coen Brothers comedy, but are played completely straight here.

Some of this is certainly meant as a critique of early 00’s Japanese capitalism, but the bland writing, the one note characters and Isaka’s slick yet uninteresting direction bury that lede rather effectively.

My Girlfriend is a Serial Killer aka Love and Murder of Sheep and Wolf aka Hitsuji to Okami no Koi to Satsujin (2019): Also not as successful as I’d like it to be is this manga adaptation by Kayoko Asakura, about a hikikomori (Yosuke Sugino) who falls in love with the neighbour (Haruka Fukuhara) he has started spying on through a hole in the connecting wall between their apartments, and continues to do so even when she turns out to be serial killer. This one suffers from the weird decision to underplay how perverse its set up actually is and go from there. Instead it plays things off as if this were a pretty traditional romantic comedy, just with more bursts of blood and violence as central problems to the relationship. Even the random murder of strangers is played without any weight, not just by the characters but by the film as a whole.

It’s a much better movie than this post’s first entry, mind you: it is entertaining throughout, it just never gets anywhere interesting or too unpleasant (which we might blame the manga for?) with a set-up absolutely built to.

The Night Digger aka The Road Builder (1971): This British movie by Alastair Reid, apparently adapted from a Joy Cowley novel by Roald Dahl to get post-stroke work for his wife, the excellent Patricia Neal, on the other hand, does know a bit about the perverse, and willingly admits to it. When the film is not a bit of a broad satire of the manners of the country bourgeoisie, this is an in turns sharp and ambiguous movie about loneliness, horrible families, and the way the worst kind of love can worm itself into one’s heart if one has been beaten around by life enough. It’s also a thriller with a nasty streak that still manages to feature little to no on-screen violence, a sleazy bit of exploitation that seems to beam its nastiest implications into your brain instead of showing it, and a heart-breaking character study for Neal.

It’s pretty fantastic in often very unexpected ways, is what I’m saying.

In short: One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942)

World War II. The crew of a British bomber damaged while bombing the Daimler factory in Stuttgart has to bail over Holland. They have to make their way through the occupied country to reach the North Sea. Fortunately, the Dutch – at least in the movie, I don’t know enough about resistance against the Nazis in the Netherlands to comment on how truthful the film is – have developed various ways to sabotage the works of the Nazis, and are happy to help the British along. Once they’ve found proof the protagonists are indeed British and not a Nazi plan to find resistance cells.

Leave it to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (here both credited as directors and writers) to make a propaganda movie that still holds up decades later – and it’s not even their only one.

One of the things that distinguishes all of the Archers’ wartime films is their lack of hatred. It’s not that you could ever confuse them with fascist sympathizers, but the Germans in their films are usually recognizable as people, if people fighting for the worst of causes. In this particular case, there really aren’t any Germans on screen as characters, the film focuses on the bomber crew and the Dutch resistance, as mostly embodied in women (all played by British actresses, by the way). That these women are portrayed as eminently capable, intelligent and morally upright – the couple of big patriotic speeches here are given to them – is a particularly fascinating aspect of the film when looked upon from a time 75 years later when there are  still men so frightened of women doing important things in their entertainment they feel the pressing need to make cuts of popular space operas devoid of women. Powell and Pressburger obviously met actual women.


In general, One of Our Aircraft has a consciously mundane tone that makes the moments of pathos and the eminently effective suspense sequences all the more believable. This isn’t just a film about people being resistant to evil, but one about people being resistant to evil while still living their lives as much as it is possible as part of their resistance, as disturbed as these lives may be through war. This adds up wonderfully with the film’s general interest in small gestures, actors suggesting swathes of emotion mostly through looks, and does of course fit nicely with the mythical stiff upper lip the film not so much preaches for as shows practiced. Most heroism here is of the quiet sort; that doesn’t mean it isn’t still heroism.