There's a genuinely wonderful moment about half-way through Takashi Miike's latest, Lumberjack the Monster, where Kazuya Kamenashi's Akira appears to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown whilst watching his beautiful, heiress fiancé sing to a gang of appreciative orphans. Akira, parentless himself, spent part of his childhood in exactly this orphanage, recovering from the experiments performed on him by a pair of deranged kidnappers. Akira has grown up confident and self-assured but acutely emotionless, a state of being that has allowed him to bully or strong-arm his way into a life of privilege. An inconclusive run-in with the axe murderer that the film is named for has him spiralling: his head injury has upset his brain chemistry, allowing long since silenced emotions to bubble up to the surface.
The horror he experiences when watching his would-be wife behaving maternally then isn't one predicated on all that Akira has missed in life, rather it is premised on the coming adjustments that he is now loathed to make. Plotted like an airport potboiler, that is crammed with twists and counter-solutions, Miike's surprisingly austere Lumberjack entertains thanks to its principle lunatics: both killers maintain surface-level presentations and behavioural patterns that bely their true nature. Their entire lives are immaculately composed pantomimes. When a fractured skull upsets Akira's bad wiring, Hiroyoshi Koiwai's screenplay (adapted from Mayusuke Kurai's novel) does not focus on the joy of his reawakened humanity. Akira is instead inundated with information that upsets the delicate equilibrium he has fought so hard to establish. Relationships, even with other sociopaths, have taken on fresh and inconvenient meaning.
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