Available on VOD
Cast:
Mitsuru Fukikoshi as Nobuyuki Shamoto
Denden as Yukio Murata
Asuka Kurosawa as Aiko Murata
Megumi Kagurazaka as Taeko Shamoto
Directed by Shion Sono
Review:
If you every wondered who Kyung-Chul, the vicious serial murderer brilliantly played by Min-sik Choi in Jee-woon Kim’s stunning I Saw the Devil, would want to hang out and have drinks with, look no further than fellow narcissistic sociopath Yukio Murata in Shion Sono’s Cold Fish.
Murata, the highly successful owner of an exotic fish shop, insinuates himself into the life of meek fellow fish shop owner Shamoto. Murata puts Shamoto’s troubled daughter to work in his store and is soon having sex with Shamoto’s wife. But Murata’s hold on Shamoto doesn’t end there. Shamoto is made an accomplice to the poisoning and extremely gory dismemberment of one of Murata’s business partners, during which it’s revealed this is by no means Murata’s first victim.
Murata and his wife Aiko continue to dominate and push Shamoto until he finally reaches his limit and pushes back with very bloody results.
Director Sono and screenwriter Yoshiki Takahashi based Cold Fish on a real life multiple murder case from the mid-1990’s centered around an exotic dog breeder, his wife and their business partner.
While the resulting film is certainly unique and notable in that it presents one of the grimmest views of humanity in recent cinematic memory, Cold Fish is by no means a total success.
One of the key stumbling blocks in the film is the over-the-top, too often cartoonish performance by Denden as Murata. This is an element that deals the film a serious blow in terms of overall credibility and quality.
This is a role where the actor needed to be seriously reined in by the director and wasn’t, the result being an overwhelming feeling that Denden was not the right actor for the role. The film needed an actor like Takeshi Kitano in the role of Murata to bring out the quiet, dark intensity that lies under the character’s upbeat, gregarious showman exterior.
Another negative is the elongated running time of almost 2 1/2 hours, which in this particular case has the effect of making the events of the film feel far more drawn out than necessary. This long running time, wherein the film’s build-up starts to feel dull and repetitive, also robs the climax of the film of the majority its intended power.
Ultimately, Cold Fish comes off as a more cerebral, Japanese take on the true crime-based Hong Kong Category III thrillers that were very popular in the early 1990’s such as Dr. Lamb and The Untold Story.
One of the posters for Cold Fish features the Shamata character wearing broken glasses, a riff on the famous poster for Sam Peckinpah’s controversial 1971 film Straw Dogs. Both films are about withdrawn characters who are pushed to the point of extreme violence. In Straw Dogs, the David Sumner character takes a stand to defend his home. In Cold Fish, the repressed rage the Shamata character has built up from his life choices and highly dysfunctional family life comes to a head under the abusive treatment of Murata and explodes.
While director Shion Sono and screenwriter Yoshiki Takahashi are to be applauded for making a film with no remotely likable characters (see Jorge Michel Grau’s Mexican cannibal film We Are What We Are for another recent, and much more successful, attempt at this ambitious feat), all told Cold Fish emerges as a film more interesting to write about than to actually watch.
A production of the Japanese film company Nikkatsu’s Sushi Typhoon division which has gotten a lot of press as of late, Cold Fish is definitely the anomaly in Sushi Typhoon’s output which has thus far been known for light on story, heavy on effects slaughter-fests like Mutant Girls Squad, Helldriver and Yakuza Weapon among others.
It’s no surprise that Cold Fish strays from that pack as it is much more directly in line with the bizarre, off-kilter nature of Sono’s other work, including Suicide Club, Strange Circus and the heavily critically acclaimed Love Exposure.
