Little earthquakes

Tender heartwrenching nihilism tragedy. Mark Retribution (2006, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) slowburn burntout police procedural that turns out to be a ghost story whose thesis is boomer deranged psychopath mental asylum patient as the result of gentrification enacts full scale mass murder serial killer plot against the entire city.

     Such desperation is to be found in the source of the murder impulse here. Specifically the way Psychoghost is prisoner by her own decision in the liminal black soot sanitarium and each of her proxies were passengers on the Bayside Ferry commuters the only albeit distant contact with life outside. And if you put on your thinking cap this is a big outside motif here. As in outside of the awareness of abuse. Outside of mental illness. Outside of social interpersonal connection. You know stuff like that. Yet through a glass darkly in the blink of an eye we see her.

 
The homicidal cue that plagues the instruments of Psychoghost’s homicidal wrath stems from the vulnerability through which it’s channeled. Nobody notices me. So the variety of unsettling Kiyoshi Kurosawa conjures in Retribution is unreliable morality. And the ending is a knockout.
     Psychoghost’s spirit control killings are breadcrumbs to lead detective YOSHIOKA Kôji Yashuko to her. Most J-horror ghost stories much like our modern age of social media just want their voices to be heard. And the resolution we seem to get is that Psychoghost chose the detective because he probably something like morbidly refused to let go of his wife HARUE who as it turns out we didn’t know the whole time was also a ghost. So the super messed up ending is really Harue has to accept that although the detective has finally moved on which means she will no longer have to be his ghostwife he will most definitely be helping with Psychoghost’s killing spree.
     Yet most unsettling of all is we are never told what happened to Harue. That’s a choice. It’s intentional. It’s beyond ambiguous. It’s withheld. The floral dress print remains figure lying face down on the floor of the detective’s flat with the braided hair is most definitely the body of a child. I love that a dark secret can be a dark secret. It doesn’t matter what happened to Harue what matters is what it’s done to the detective. Except something else crazy to think about is Psychoghost probably knows and might even have added to her reasons for choosing him.
 
The other homicides are crucial. To repeat myself yet again it’s to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s strengths of somehow granting importance lived in character dynamic verisimilitude everyday relatability to all of his however small of their role supporting characters. Even though we know the impulse driving them is misguided rantings of a psychopath I still empathize if not condone at least what SAKUMA does.
     The doctor whose kid bullies him how can you not? When that snotty punk rudely asks his doctor dad for a hundred used syringes to pay off an upperclassman at the high school brings the gentrification angle into a parallel for degradation of society class family values. And I feel for the schlub. When schlub dad rams the plunger of anesthetics into the kid I swear the emotional underscoring facilitates relief disavowal approval resolution Retribution.