The World of Kanako movie review (2015)

Lest you think “The World of Kanako” is a playful homage or a stylish ride, be warned. This is a movie with enough gore, rape, murder, drug use and horrible behavior to make Takashi Miike blink. It is not an easy watch. And it does feel sometimes like excess for the sake of excess. But then starKoji Yakusho will do something unexpected emotionally or Nakashima and cinematographer Shôichi Atô will find a striking image and the movie will win you back. Like the characters who are constantly either in love or murderous rage, Nakashima pushes and pulls at his own audience.

The great Yakusho (“13 Assassins”) plays Akikazu Fujishima, a retired cop who seems to live for nothing. Not long ago, he caught his wife having an affair and plowed into their car before pulling the man from the vehicle and beating him. He hasn’t seen his daughter Kanako (Nana Komatsu) in a long time, pops pills and has taken to vomiting in rainy alleys. When he learns that Kanako is missing, he is given new purpose, although his misanthropy makes him something of a loose cannon. As he descends to a world of drugs and prostitution to try and find Kanako, Nakashima flashes back and forth chronologically to tie the two timelines together and reveal what happened to Kanako.

From the beginning, “The World of Kanako” is designed in a way to be unsettling. The opening scenes with close-ups of sweaty faces spurting lines like “I love you” and “I’ll kill you,” set the dual themes of the piece—love and violence—but they do so in a way that’s discomforting. There’s a sense of displacement and confusion, especially for the first act, that’s not unlike a late night in a club. You barely hear snippets of conversation over the loud music, and Fujishima and editor Yoshiyuki Koike don’t hold a shot for more than a few seconds. Even scenes of dialogue between two relatively normal characters—like when Fujishima is talking to Kanako’s classmates or her doctor—are cut together from several angles.