Villain

Eri Fukatsu plays Mitsuyo, a lonely woman who works in a men’s clothing store, and one day, against all common sense, she runs away with Shimizu (Satoshi Tsumabuki), a disaffected loner. Mitsuyo knows that Shimizu has killed Yoshino (Kirin Kiki), a pretty young woman he meets through an online dating site, but she believes, or wants to believe, that he is a good man overwhelmed by impossible circumstances. Which interpretation is actually the case is the internal paradox of the film. Akunin made a deservedly big splash for its complex treatment of Shimizu’s crime of passion. Might we all, it asks along with Mitsuyo, kill if the circumstances are right? The film’s painfully arrived at ultimate position is that it is hard, make that impossible, to say. – Martha P. Nochimson, Cineaste