Angel Dust

Languishing as a 480p rip posted to YouTube, writer-director Gakuryuu Ishii's Angel Dust ends up being well-served by this kind of blotchy reproduction. The striking images within the film strain to resolve their detail while intense, onscreen colours bleed and overlap their boundaries; an unintended effect that amplifies the principle character's precarious grip on not just the unfolding mystery but reality itself. Ishii, who made his name with dystopian punk rock pieces like Crazy Thunder Road and Burst City (a setting the director returned to in 2001 with Electric Dragon 80.000 V) applies this deep-seated skepticism to the urban crime procedural, arriving at packed train carriages in which young women gasp in the rush hour crush then silently expire. Kaho Minami plays Dr Setsuko Suma, a forensic psychiatrist working alongside the police to solve these anonymous and seemingly motiveless attacks. Something of a psychic, Setsuko is able to tune herself to unseen wavelengths emanating from the killer's refrigerated victims. An ability that threatens to blot out her own identity. Ishii and cinematographer Norimichi Kasamatsu frame Setsuko as very much a woman in a man's world, the slight actress often packed into frames where she appears either small and vulnerable or observed at an unnerving remove. Told in an unhurried fashion, Ishii packs his film with strobing crime scene imagery, the clacking of mechanical gadgets, and several awed glances at Mount Fuji that seem to suggest that malignant energies are seeping out of this enormous black mountain.