Radiance Films: The Inugami Family (1976) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Radiance Films

Kon Ichikawa is probably best remembered for his mid-1950s post-WWII Japanese anti-war dramas The Burmese Harp and later Fires on the Plain (later remade by Shinya Tsukamoto) as well as the Cannes favorite Odd Obsession and his Olympics documentary epic Tokyo Olympiad.  While boutique labels like The Criterion Collection have spearheaded the remasters and rereleases of many of the aforementioned Ichikawa masterworks, one of his greatest and most successful films of his native homeland The Inugami Family remained curiously overlooked by the company for years.  Made in 1976 for Toho and produced by Haruki Kadokawa, it was an award-winning detective story and marked the first screen iteration of novelist Seishi Yokomizo’s legendary supersleuth Kosuke Kindaichi (Kōji Ishizaka).  Ichikawa would not only revisit this character four more times, in a fifth film he remade his own movie in 2006 as The Inugamis with Ishikaza once more reprising Kindaichi in what ultimately became the director’s final work.

 
While the series was highly successful in Japan as well as on everything from Neon Genesis Evangelion to JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure to videogame novels like The Inugami Curse to Kindaichi Mystery Series to television shows ranging throughout the 1977s to the 2000s, the film itself which kickstarted the whole movement remained curiously unavailable in the United States.  That is until Radiance Films stepped in and secured a new 4K restoration comprised with archival interviews with leading actor Ishizaka and director Ichikawa, a making of documentary, restoration demonstration, collectible booklet and reversible sleeve art with the time-honored OBI spine.  The resulting release represents one of Radiance Films’ most exciting releases if not the most powerfully engrossing and surprising murder mystery thriller as sardonic darkly comic social commentary sprinkled with elements of horror and arterial spray. 

 
Opening deceptively simply at first, wealthy family patriarch Sahei Inugami (Rentaro Mikuni) dies leaving behind his family fortune to Tamayo (Yoko Shimada) an outsider not aligned by blood to other family members.  She’ll inherit the estate provided she marries one of his grandsons, one of which Kiyo (Teruhiko Aoi in dual roles) is horrifically disfigured by wartime injuries and hides behind a mask concealing his appearance.  With Kiyo’s mercurial identity in doubt and immediate controversy ensuing over the terms of the will, one by one someone is murdering the grandsons.  Enter detective Kosuke Kindaichi (Kōji Ishizaka) who using his acumen and sleuthing skills to sift through the disparate conflicting testimonies and piling body count, pointing towards red herrings and the least likely of culprits as our own understanding of the events at large and alliances keeps changing. 

 
Spanning two-and-a-half-hours with not a minute wasted including some scary asides that threaten to break out into violence, Kon Ichikawa’s beautiful, painterly epic lensed in exquisite and mannered precise 1.50:1 by Kiyoshi Hasegawa and a recurring, appropriately low key jazz noir oriented score by Proof of the Man composer Yuji Ohno and adapted for the screen by Ichikawa alongside Norio Nagata and Shinya Hidaka is a stone cold masterpiece.  There’s a wide array of post-production developmental editing techniques designed to give particular scenes a still-photo braille-like look in addition to rapid-fire blink-and-you’ll-miss-it subliminal flash cuts.  Performances across the board, notably leading man Kōji Ishizaka as the central detective hero and only morally straightforward character in this sordid saga, are all excellent and out on a limb.  Startlingly gory for a classy mainstream Japanese crime thriller, Ichikawa’s film is the kind of twisty turning neo-noir that keeps viewers rapt as it works in elements that creep and burrow under the skin and leave an unshakable impression long after you’ve finished it.

 
Regarded as the very first Haruki Kadokawa film which itself caused a measure of infamy as he inserted himself at the epicenter of the film’s promotional campaign, The Inugami Family went on to become an enormous commercial success, taking in 1.56 billion yen in ticket sales as well as jump starting a number of television programs which capitalized on the Inugami phenomenon at its height.  Soon after Kadokawa would embark on Proof of the Man while Ichikawa continued with Ishizaka down many more adventures with the legendary detective.  An uncompromising and bold distinctly Japanese response to the rise of the Agatha Christie films like Murder on the Orient Express which reinvigorated the Japanese film industry and Kon Ichikawa’s filmmaking career, The Inugami Family now available on Blu-ray disc for the first time in the United States represents easily one of the top later-tier home video releases of the Fall season of 2026!

--Andrew Kotwicki