Deaths in Tokimeki (Tokimeki ni shisu)

"How do you follow up a surprise hit like The Family Game? Yoshimitsu Morita smartly decided against a re-run of his brilliant, dead-pan comedy and went for something altogether stranger and more mysterious. Deaths in Tokimeki tells the disturbing, compulsive story of a hit-man waiting to carry out a job: the assassination of the leader of a religious cult, masterminded by the leader's own deputy. But it is a story that is told in blocks, like the phrases in a child's computer game, and what counts most is not the narrative but the spaces between the blocks-the gaps that are filled with undefined menaces as potent as anything in Lovecraft.... You could imagine David Bowie playing this hit-man, so it's no surprise that Morita chose to cast Japan's foremost androgynous pop-star Kenji Sawada (Mishima). The film makes great play with Sawada's bizarre persona, but it's not really a star vehicle in the usual sense. This is very much a director's film, the product of a young talent sparking on all engines. It is also a dread-filled thriller with a shocking, convulsive climax." Tony Rayns, Edinburgh Film Festival

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