I, The Executioner
As the police investigate a sudden rash of brutal murders whose victims are all women the unscrupulous killer’s murky motivations remain hauntingly elusive. A labyrinthine character study slowly unfolds implying that the targets of these unspeakable acts may be culpable in their own shocking demise. Although director Tai Kato worked within the studio system mostly on genre films, his distinctly bold and somber style proved him a maverick auteur, with I, the Executioner one of his most incendiary masterpieces. Kato matches the film’s bleak narrative themes to its innovative aesthetics, “with blown out negatives, extreme close-ups, and deep focus mixed with his characteristic low angle composition to add to the sense of noirish dread which paints the modern city as an inescapable hellscape” (Haley Scanlon - Windows on Worlds).
Cast
- Makoto Sato
- Chieko Baisho
- Sanae Nakahara
- Ranfan Ou
- "Tai Kato, best known for his yakuza and period films, pulls out all the stops in this visually arresting, nihilistic modern-day tale of a man on a brutal murder and rape spree, using extreme close-ups and unusually low-angle shots to make his rage viscerally palpable. "
- "Surprisingly avant-garde, Kato experiments with blown out negatives, extreme close up, and deep focus mixed with his characteristic low angle composition to add to the sense of noirish dread which paints the modern city as an inescapable hellscape...."
- "It is a movie that pushes film noir so far in both story and photography that other famous examples look positively sunny. [A]lmost impossible to forget once you have seen it."
- "[U]p there with Oshima's Violence at Noon and Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine as one of Japan's most disturbing anatomies of a serial killer."
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