For nearly 20 years, the Austin, Texas-based Fantastic Fest has grown to be the largest genre film festival in the country, bringing films from both new directors and veteran storytellers, as well as repertory films often restored and/or celebrating landmark anniversaries. The only criteria to play Fantastic Fest is that the film is provocative, whether it be in the genres of action, horror, science-fiction, comedy, or just generally cool and passionate about its subject. The festival is a place ripe for discovery. There are other events besides screenings at this festival, but I tend to zero in on as many films as I can get to. And so it begins…
Cloud
During the day, young Ryosuke (Masaki Suda) works a distinctly non-challenging job at a laundry facility in Japan. But it’s his side hustle that is quickly becoming so successful that he turns down a promotion to management and decides to devote his attention to reselling merchandise on the internet (finding great bargains and putting them up for sale at a greatly elevated price). His girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) is excited about his prospects, which coincidentally start to look up right when the two are starting to talk about moving in together and possibly even getting married.
Ryosuke’s workload becomes so profitable that he decides to hire an assistant named Sano (Daiken Okudaira), who is beyond useful but perhaps a bit too eager to make his boss’s business more efficient. Sano is also the first to notice that a rapidly growing group of people online are talking in chatrooms devoted to how much they hate Ryosuke’s practices and how they are investigating what his real name is and where he lives so they can teach him a lesson. Soon, Ryosuke is living in constant fear that someone is following or watching him, and his paranoia begins to grow exponentially as the ultimate internet trolls close in.
Cloud writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (best known for more artfully done horror works like Cure and Pulse) is entering new and refreshing territory with this story, still giving us extraordinary attention to detail but also masterfully building suspense and a growing sense of dread. In its final act, the movie turns into something more of a traditional action movie, but even within that framework, Kurosawa transforms the film into a journey of a non-violent man driven to kill to protect himself and the few people he cares about.
The morality of what goes on in Cloud is the key—some borderline illegal elements of his work, Ryosuke doesn’t concern himself with—and the very different performances among the three leads work so well together that we get to marvel at the way Kurosawa keeps us guessing who’s working with Ryosuke and who is secretly plotting for his downfall. It’s a subtle but still action-packed series of turns that is more about the characters than the twists. This was a great kickoff to the festival.
Ghost Killer
Although , Ghost Killer, the new work from Japan, is directed by Shane Chunt, the real star of the show is action choreographer/director Kensuke Sonomura, who has been a performer and action director across nearly 70 films. This entry centers on Fumika (Akari Takaishi), a young woman who is just trying to keep her head above water in the business world. She can’t quit her job, afford her place, or keep company with decent men because she must surround herself with entitled assholes in order to get her work done.
One night walking home, she finds a bullet casing on the ground that just happens to have been used to kill professional hitman Hideo (Masanori Mimoto) very recently. His body has been taken away, but his ghost shows itself to Fumika, since apparently they’re now bonded by this casing, and he can even possess her body and fight like Hideo used to. No one else can see or hear him, but through her, he can convince them that he’s really using her as a conduit.
Of course, she resists and complains. She has a life that she’s barely holding together and hanging out with a new spectral friend wasn’t on her agenda. But she soon begins to realize that as soon as she and Hideo join forces to get revenge on those who killed him, he may vanish from her life. It sounds more complicated than it is, but essentially, Hideo convinces Fumika to help him avenge his death, and a whole heap of top-notch action sequences kick off.
Describing how incredible a particular action sequence or movie is seems pointless; you need to just see it, and you’ll fully understand. When the action is at full tilt, Ghost Killer is one of the best action works you’ll see all year (or maybe next year, depending when/if it ever gets released here). Star Mimoto is also a legendary stunt performer, so he’s doing his own stunts most of the time, and what results are a series of set pieces that are without question some of the most inventive action moments in recent memory. There are unnecessary twirls and little flourishes that are strictly for the camera and serve no purpose as a fighting style, but damn do they look cool.
Naturally, the two leads start to care about one another, and so when they finally do say goodbye, it’s more emotionally powerful than you might expect from a film like this. Fumika whines and protests too much, even though she understands her ghost follower can’t leave her side until he kills his assassins. Even the way the director handles moments (with camera tricks and precise editing) when the two leads are switching places in the middle of a fight sequence (not unlike Edgar Wright did with two women dancing with the same man in Last Night in Soho) is memorable. Ghost Killer is clever, wonderfully executed, and beautifully accessible, despite the potential for confusion in a possession movie.