Dustin Roberts
By the time most horror fans became aware of Takashi Miike with 1999’s horrifyingly disturbing Audition, he’d already directed 31 movies. Between that horror classic and his other, almost equally infamous Ichi the Killer, he’s got a reputation as being a J-Horror master although his extremely prolific filmography now totaling 122 movies, pretty much runs the gamut from extreme horror to traditional dramas to family-friendly children’s movies. Lumberjack the Monster is his first return to horror in a decade, and while it isn’t as gonzo as his most famous movies, it’s a worthy addition to his intimidating body of work.
This is all relatively speaking, of course. Compared to movies like Audition, Ichi the Killer, or 13 Assassins very few films will feel nearly as unconventional or epically wild. On its own, it’s a fun, blood-soaked ride, in turns intensely thrilling, and thoughtfully humane. It’s decidedly not the nihilistic vision that many audiences have come to expect from a Miike movie, and I think that that helps assuage any disappointment at its comparative lack of over-the-top insanity—there’s a sense of humanity pulsing throughout this movie that many of his others lack. Still, fans looking for a true return to Miike’s demented classics may be a little disappointed with this outing, but if you meet it where it is, you’ll find a very entertaining thriller.
Lumberjack the Monster is the new Takashi Miike movie based on a novel of the same name by Mayusuke Kurai. It stars Kazuya Kamenashi as Akira Ninomiya, a lawyer who happens to be a psychopath, Shota Sometani plays Sugitani, a psychopathic doctor, and partner of Kurai’s. They work together to try to get revenge on a serial killer who appears to be hunting down and horrifically murdering people who he has reason to believe are psychopaths with an ax, and then removing their brains. Nanao plays a detective, and police profiler named Ranko Toshiro, who is attempting to stop the serial killings.
The twists and turns that the narrative takes are a large part of the fun of this movie, so I won’t give much more away here, but watching two men who lack the capacity for empathy and human emotion going after one another, all while a brilliant detective remains on their heels, is largely thrilling. It’s a movie that feels tauter for a majority of its runtime than the script has any right to be, because of Miike’s intense sense of style and, no less central, Kamenashi’s performance as the revenge-seeking psycho lawyer.
Still, as the plot unfolds, I couldn’t help but feel the seams of the script increasingly tear. The story becomes more and more convoluted, requiring more and more exposition to clarify the story to the audience. The most interesting aspects of the plot—two unrelenting psychopaths hunting one another, with one of them, seemingly, on the verge of redemption—become sidelined for far too long, as the less interesting aspects—what is effectively a police procedural—take center stage. The detective bits are much more clichéd, involving Nanao’s borderline psychic profiler detective who breaks the rules in her search of justice, all while looking beautiful, if a little aloof. It’s stuff that we’ve seen before, more compellingly.
But the good stuff? The good stuff is very good. Kamenashi is constantly compelling as a man without a conscience, coldly moving through the world without any emotions for his fellow man. As his situation becomes increasingly complicated, he naturally shifts into what seems to be a more humane version of himself. Without giving too much away, the question of whether a man who has done the most reprehensible actions imaginable can ever redeem himself looms large over this movie, and Kamenashi’s performance is central in making that work. If the movie started losing me in its back half, it won me over again with its undeniably epic and pitch-perfect climax.
Miike is a master stylist, and he infuses tons of style into Lumberjack the Monster, which is full of sharp neon lights and an intense, absolutely killer violin-based score. This movie is dazzlingly punchy, if less overwhelming than some of his previous movies. Compared with an earlier Miike work like Ichi the Killer, the directing in Lumberjack the Monster is more reserved and, maybe, more mature. One gets the sense that Miike isn’t interested in impressing anyone at this point in his prolific career, and as a result, he allows himself to hold back. In doing so, he is freed up to focus on the humanity of his characters, something that he didn’t seem terribly interested in his more well-known movies. This movie asks us if empathy is the most important element in being a human being. If we are truly only defined by our actions, then is there any possible way that we can ever become more than the things that we have done? These are compelling questions to consider in a movie about serial killers, but I don’t think that Lumberjack the Killer examines these concepts as completely as I would have liked, stopping short of where it could have gone to achieve the heights possible with its conceit. In doing so, it doesn’t commit as completely to either of its interests as one might think—never going as cartoonishly insane as its premise might allow, nor fully exploring its more philosophical ideas.
At the end of the day, Lumberjack the Killer isn’t quite another Miike masterpiece, but even a B-level Miike horror-thriller is likely to be more fascinating and intense than the majority of releases that one is likely to encounter on Netflix. His hardcore fans will likely be thrilled, while those who know of his work primarily by his reputation garnered by movies like Audition and Ichi the Killer may well be a little underwhelmed.
