Being the film maker who I saw the most works from in 2020,I decided to kick the New Year off,by looking at his credits whilst I was taking part in a best films of 1980 poll. Having found his TV Horror Movie The Fang in the Hole (1979-also reviewed) to be superb,I got set to claw open another title.
Note:This review contains some plot details.
View on the film:
Made the same year he returned to the cinema with Zigeunerweisen, (1980-also reviewed) directing auteur Seijun Suzuki gives this 45 minute TV Movie the same amount of care and attention as he gave his two and a half hour epic made for the big screen.
Crossing the paths of his major recurring motifs, Suzuki continues to expand on the dash of Giallo he had spread in The Fang in the Hole, staging the murder set-piece with a trench-coat wearing killer whose face is out of shot from the viewer, and the strangely named Divine Beast stature, (animals or weird objects that the film is named after being a staple of Gialli titles) being surrounded in locations dripping with shimmering decadent chic reds,pinks and blues.
Putting the pieces of the statue back together as the murder gets investigated, Suzuki expands upon taking his unique distorted framing, Japanese New Wave ultra-stylisation into the increasingly avant-garde surrealist experimentation, brilliantly revealing the motive for the murder by having a flashback taking place which merges into the present setting.
Whilst the excellent cast is sadly not credited with which role they played,Yasuhiro Sakurai thankfully is for the thrilling screenplay. Sculpted from a story by Taiwanese-Japanese author Chin Shun-shin, Sakurai's adaptation makes this the most openly political of Suzuki's works,as the slotting in of clues to the mysterious murder, reveals the ghosts (ghosts being something that would feature in Suzuki's Taisho trilogy) that still haunt those horrified by the horrors performed by Japanese forces during Second Sino-Japanese War,as the divine beast reveals the claws.
