Villain Review

Accused of the murder of a girl he met on a dating site, Yuichi (Satoshi Tsumabuki) goes on the run with his latest hook-up, Mitsuyo (Eri Fukatsu), while the family of the dead girl struggle to put their lives back together and make sense of the tragedy. (Twin Peaks was huge in Japan, remember.) The pervasive sense of social realism, so rare in Japanese cinema, may explain the lavish praise showered on Lee Sang-il’s film in its native Japan. We in the west, where such naturalism is commonplace, may be left scratching our heads at the film’s occasional lapses into melodrama and histrionic overacting, while to describe the pace as glacial would be to insult the dizzying speeds of which continent-sized ice shelves are comparatively capable.