It
was supposed to be the Rope of zombie
movies, filmed in one continuous shot. Then the zombies attack for real.
However, if you think that sounds crazy, wait until you see it all again from a
different perspective. Zombies get the mash-up treatment like never before in Shinichiro
Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead (trailer here), which screens
during the 2018 New York Asian Film Festival.
Higurashi
is a bullying director a thousand times worse than Peter O’Toole in The Stunt Man. He has so little regard
for cast and crew safety, he awakens the zombie curse hanging over their remote
location, an abandoned industrial site, where the Japanese military reportedly staged
sinister occult experiments during WWII. As crew-members turn into feral
zombies, Higurashi finally gets the realistic performances he wants from his
terrified thesps.
However,
there is much more going on outside the camera’s field of vision. In a complete
change of tone, the film goes from a Night
of the Living Dead rip-off to a worthy successor to Noises Off. It is hard to explain out of context, but Ueda’s
editing is absolutely masterful. You just need to see it for yourself.
One
of the many cool things about Cut is
how completely Ueda and his cast commit to each phase of the film. The second
and third acts are so wickedly clever, precisely because we were with the cast-members
when they were running for their lives during the opening set-up.
Takayuki
Hamatsu could possibly give the performance of the year as Higurashi. He certainly
shows phenomenal range. Yet, Harumi Syuhama arguably eclipses his lunacy as
Nao, the makeup artist who turns into a berserk killing machine and also acts pretty
nuts in the third act as well. Mao develops some smart but endearing chemistry
with them both as her namesake, an aspiring filmmaker.
