Western audiences have had their pick of Japanese crime thrillers in recent years, as more and more films, old and new, have received releases. This means perhaps that a new generation of audiences has become enraptured by the idea of Japan’s seedy underworld, with its molls and its gangsters, its ultraviolence and its gore. That feels like the case with She’s Just a Shadow, a brand-new excursion into Japan’s underbelly which is in many ways a love note to what has gone before it. In other respects, though, this is a very novel approach to the subject matter, splicing dreamlike states and multiple story threads in with aspects of other genres, notably pinku. It’s an ambitious film which almost trips over itself to include everything it wants to include, but for all that, it’s good to see a director with such an artistic eye lending his own spin to his story.
The film certainly frontloads its intentions in the opening scenes, too, particularly in terms of its adult themes. We witness a cop – or a guy dressed as a cop, at least – who has kidnapped a young woman. He takes her to the train tracks outside the city, where he performs shibari on her before leaving her suspended over the railway line to die. And that’s in the first few minutes, folks. We are then introduced to our main character Irene (Tao Okamoto), who – alongside her mother – comprises one of the doyennes of the city’s crime underworld, facilitating drug deals and working as a madam to fund her lifestyle. Her henchmen, particularly pimp Mr Red Hot (Kentez Asaka) are kept busy protecting her interests from rival gangs, and a gratuitously splattery bar brawl shown shortly afterwards demonstrates how far her boys will go. We’re also introduced to some of the gang’s other most notable players and hangers-on, such as Gaven (Kihiro), a kind of fatalistic binge-drinker who by turns wants to ‘get away from it all’ but, as with the massive majority of addicts with easy access to their substances of choice, can’t quite do that.
Meanwhile, it seems that our guy from the opening scenes is still out there and still a menace to the city’s women; he’s even being referred to as a ‘serial killer’ by this point. Irene has the double jeopardy of sustaining her crime kingdom and protecting her girls who, as prostitutes, are all too vulnerable to the malign attentions of strangers. But the girls must keep working after all. Inevitably, the two worlds will collide. Not only are the girls themselves at risk, it seems as though their madam is, too.
In real terms, She’s Just a Shadow is quite plot-lite, slowly morphing into a revenge story which takes its sweet time to unfold. Along the way, though, there are many interesting sequences and styles, if you can tolerate the slow-reveal style of the film (which comes in at just under two hours, a common enough thing when the writer, director and producer are all one and the same person). I feel that the use of colour, the staging and the larger-than-life characters all look good on screen; the girls here are like mad hybrids of several Japanese subcultures all at once, including (bizarrely) ganguro; the action sequences, when they come, are pretty good too, and I liked the use of illusion and dream sequences along the way.
I’ve seen other reviews which look disparagingly at the use of nudity in the film; I mentioned pinku eiga earlier, but to be honest, She’s Just a Shadow surpasses them in terms of its own content, and of course this kind of content isn’t going to be for everyone. If you see the film as something akin to leafing slowly through a particularly gratuitous graphic novel, then it makes a lot more sense. There are issues with the film, though, the main one of which is the film’s script. On several occasions, the script works against the aesthetic of the film, lending people insincere or nonsensical utterances (sometimes rendered more improbable somehow by the blend of American English and Japanese accents – this is a hybrid of a film made in Tokyo but acted in English, which leads to some language tics). It’s a shame when a killer scene is then overlaid with something garbled. A hazard of the choices made, unfortunately, but it can be disruptive at times.
Still, as a gaudy tale of excess, there’s more than enough to satisfy here. She’s Just a Shadow is lurid, overblown and often dreamlike, with its nods to other films (such as Pulp Fiction, at least in terms of some of the shots used) overlaid with high colour and good choices in music. These features do help to raise a conventional gangster yarn to new, improbable heights, even if there are a few hurdles along the way.
She’s Just a Shadow will be released to VOD (US) on 22nd September 2019.