Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. We’re halfway through the spring season at this point, which means most new shows have lost their opening act glamor, and I can start figuring out what’s actually worth following this season. I’ll obviously be catching up on The Witch From Mercury at some point, but as for new arrivals, it seems like Tengoku Daimakyou is the one worth checking out? I’m also still committed to getting my house into Birdie Wing, which I think our recent return to Hot Shots Golf will help facilitate. And shit, there’s also Vinland Saga! Alright, this idle reflection has swiftly unearthed more responsibilities than I expected, so I’ll probably be chipping away at some new shows this weekend. But in the meantime, let’s burn down a fresh collection of films in the Week in Review!

First up this week was Gonin, a ‘95 yakuza drama directed by Takashi Ishii. Koichi Sato stars as Bandai, a disco owner whose business is drowning in yakuza debts following the burst of the bubble economy. Teaming up with a ragtag group of four other desperate men, he plots to steal from his debtors and escape. The plan is shaky from the start and messier still in action, and when the yakuza hire two hitmen (led by Takeshi Kitano) to track down the team, things swiftly begin to unravel.

I sought out Gonin based on a variety of tangential quasi-recommendations – somebody raving about it on twitter, the intriguing fact that this was Kitano’s first post-accident film (he even wears an eyepatch to hide a leaky eye), and rumors that much from the Yakuza franchise was cribbed from this film. What I expected was a fun, breezy crime drama, but what I got was so much more than that. Gonin is thrilling, grotesque, heartbreaking, and poignant, sparing no efforts in depicting the human cost of both the economic crash and organized crime.

Bandai and his companions exemplify Gonin’s powers of misdirection, and ability to conjure tragedy from chaos. His group consists of a gay hustler, an ex-detective, a manic salaryman, and a Thai pimp, all of whom initially come off as either familiar archetypes or simply lunatics. Through the course of their heist, that’s largely what they remain – but over the illustration of its fallout, we come to see a textured humanity in all of them, and the desperation for a return to normalcy that drove them to steal from killers. All of their stories are haunted by either the specter of economic collapse or a desire for intimacy within squalor. And though their relations initially seem fraught and fragile, their desperation to protect the people they love both within and beyond the group proves the true kindness of their nature.

Unfortunately, they are also five reckless civilians who essentially make a messy hit on a local yakuza branch, demanding swift and total retribution. After a first third mired in the recklessness and chaos of this group in collaboration, the rest of the film sees them finding glory in decline, picked off one by one by an ominous, unrelenting Kitano. Like the ephemerality of the bubble economy itself, we only come to fully understand the worth of these characters as they exit the stage, each reaching out their hand to offer a fragment of hope to those who survive. An absolute firestorm of a film, and an easy, emphatic recommendation.

We then caught up to date on our purge lore with The Forever Purge, the fifth and most recent entry in the illustrious purge canon. Five years on from The Purge: Election Year, I am relieved to say that the Purge franchise is done wondering if we can all get along. The first post-January 6th Purge dispenses with any notions of vaguely defined divisions: the violence and hatred in our society is a direct reflection of its MAGA component, and those people will not be satisfied until they kill the rest of us. Centered on a white ranching family and the Mexican workers they employ on their farm, The Forever Purge posits a January 6th expanded country-wide, where the psychopaths don’t peacefully return to their homes at the bell, and instead attempt to build a bloody America in their own image.

So yes, I am happy to see this franchise’s politics improving, even though I obviously don’t expect any sort of scintillating social commentary from the “what if we all killed each other” franchise. Additionally, The Forever Purge follows through on the lessons of its best predecessors, focusing on a tightly knit and well-established group of players in order to give its drama some emotional weight. Furthermore, Everardo Valerio Gout is by far the franchise’s strongest director yet, bringing a sense of both clarity and scale to the film’s action sequences, along with an ambition of framing that outstrips anything the franchise has previously attempted. The sequences of our heroes sneaking through a bombed-out El Paso brought to mind the conclusion of Children of Men, with impressive long cuts denying the audience a chance to catch their breath. Never thought I’d compare a purge movie to Alfonso Cuarón, but these features are apparently still full of surprises. I’m ready for the next one!

Our next viewing was a breezy Mexican slasher, the accurately named Cemetery of Terror. The film is essentially a mashup of Halloween and Evil Dead, featuring a cadre of teens whose idea of Halloween fun is stealing a corpse from a morgue and attempting to revive the dead. Unfortunately, little do they know that this particular corpse is that of a merciless serial killer (!), who is also a master of witchcraft himself (!!).

Cemetery of Terror is fairly rudimentary in most aspects of its production, but nonetheless hits all the beats you’d hope for from a pulpy slasher film. Its greatest quality is undoubtedly its embrace of excess; the film introduces a second group of younger kids halfway through just to keep the terrorizing going, and is overstuffed with delightfully grotesque zombie costumes. It’s pretty much exactly the sort of low-rent exploitation theater you’d expect from a dollar theater, or a drive-in, or perhaps playing in the background in a different movie. Not exactly filling, but who expects that from popcorn anyway?

We then checked out Kurosawa’s High and Low, the story of a National Shoes executive (Toshiro Mifune) who is in the midst of a messy corporate succession battle. Having leveraged everything for the capital to take control of the company, Mifune is about to seal the deal when he receives a call announcing his son has been kidnapped, and will die if he does not pay an exorbitant ransom. The situation only becomes more complicated when it’s revealed that it was actually the son of Mifune’s chauffeur who was abducted, prompting a brutal morality play and tense police investigation.

The first third of High and Low takes place almost entirely in Mifune’s living room, yet the tension never flags for even a second. Trapped within these walls and crushed between ambition and humanity, Mifune’s downfall plays out like the harpooning of a great whale, as violent thrashing cedes to fits of desperation, and ultimately stillness. The character blocking in this sequence is some of the best I’ve ever seen in cinema, calling to mind both the workmanly perfection of Hitchcock and the delicate grace of Ozu. And Mifune is as good as he’s ever been, with his raging inner fire barely contained within his tasteful suit, making it all the more devastating as that fire is quelled. Beyond all this, what makes this sequence and the movie at large work so well is the desperate, ugly sincerity of Mifune’s moral journey; he essentially goes through all the stages of grief in realizing his ruin, exemplifying the fraught personal calculus preceding his ultimate sacrifice.

After a heart-stopping opening act like that, the actual process of hunting down Mifune’s nemesis feels like a genuine relief, with ambiguous personal tragedy replaced by the vitalizing certainty of this opponent’s villainy. The hunt for the kidnapper offers a mix of satisfyingly intelligent police work and anxious chase sequences, tempered by consistent reminders that regardless of how this investigation resolves, the wolves Mifune was grappling with have already assured his ruin.

After a film spent tossling with the futility of righteousness and the certainty of hatred, Mifune’s final confrontation with his tormentor feels like the trial of mankind itself, with Mifune’s reflection in the glass hovering over his foe, debating the possibility of absolution. His enemy’s final scream is a roar of want that Mifune could never redress, and it’s hard to say if even Mifune is positively transformed by his plummet from hubris. That’s precisely what makes this film so human: its formal brilliance all works in service of a moral disjointedness, wherein the cast impresses whatever they want to believe of humanity on their fellows, ignoring the messy complexity of our motives in favor of comforting absolutes. To see ourselves truly, to stare into that mirror and catch our reflection without recoiling, is often more than we can bear.