Somewhere
in Japanese cult provocateur and surrealism filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto’s Nightmare
Detective, released in 2006, are recognizable set pieces from his just-previously
released claustrophobic short film Haze covered in Arrow Video’s Solid Metal Nightmares boxed set. I bring
this up because it struck me that Tsukamoto is full of wildly nightmarish
visual ideas bouncing around in his head waiting for a place to be realized on
film. While Nightmare Detective might
be his most broadly appealing directorial effort since Hiruko the Goblin,
it nonetheless is loaded with the director’s trademark imagery, speed-demon
pacing and penchant for the indescribably horrific.
After
two people die in their sleep, Tokyo Detective Keiko (pop singer Hitomi) and
her partner Wakamiya (Masanobu Ando) discover both victims had cellphones with
the number 0 being the last call dialed.
Soon their search for clues leads them to a psychic ‘nightmare detective’
who can also enter people’s dreams but fears entering another’s mind can cause irreparable
brain damage. As more people start
dropping dead, Keiko at the risk of her own life will stop at nothing to bring
the killer (whomever he is) to justice.
From
the outset this reads like the plot synopsis of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on
Elm Street, following the exploits of a killer who can enter people’s dream
states and murder them in their sleep.
In Tsukamoto’s hands, however, the film is a difficult-to-categorize detective
thriller that functions as a playground for the director’s perverse imagination
to run amok. What’s particularly
striking about Tsukamoto’s film is how it deals with fear of the unknown, as
many of the nightmarish visions glimpsed in rapid-fire editing never fully
reveal themselves in the way real nightmares tend to play out.
As
with the director’s eventual Kotoko, Tsukamoto experimented with casting
a pop singer in the lead dramatic role. In
the role of the detective, Hitomi makes Detective Keiko a headstrong but
vulnerable heroine ready to dive into the death pit to stop an inexplicable killing
spree. Also integral to the piece is Ryûhei Matsuda (best known for Kitano’s Taboo) as the
so-called Nightmare Detective.
When he first appears onscreen with his sullen gaze and long hair draped
over his face, the impression one immediately gets is that this strange
clairvoyant is cursed rather than blessed by his unusual gift.
Released
in America under the ‘Dimension Extreme’ label, Tsukamoto’s film (shot and
edited by himself) more or less came and went under the radar but in Japan
proved to be a success. For the
uninitiated this will be one of the stranger and more violent ‘bad dreams’
horror films out there, but for Tsukamoto filmgoers the territory is indeed
familiar. While I much preferred the
claustrophobic short film Haze, this was nonetheless a solid Tsukamoto
effort that rests somewhere between mainstream appeal and the director’s own
penchant for surrealism and the macabre.
Not his finest hour but definitely one worth indulging in.
--Andrew Kotwicki
