[At the recent Cannes market I had the good fortune to sit in on a market screening of Shinya Tsukamoto's Nightmare Detective 2, to my knowledge the first screening to occur outside of Japan. My thanks go to the good folks at Movie Eye for giving the go ahead to write about it publicly.]
Kyoichi Kagenuma, the Nightmare Detective, is back. Still plagued by his unwanted abilities – abilities that allow him to read thoughts and enter other people’s dreams – and still debating suicide as a means to end it all, all he wants is to be left alone with his misery. But solitude will not come. Drawn by word of his strange abilities a high school girl, Yukie Mashiro, comes to his home day after day begging him to free her from her recurring nightmares and even when left alone Kagenuma is plagued with visions of his mother who committed suicide when he was just a young boy. How can he find peace?
Director Shinya Tsukamoto has a well deserved reputation as one of the most unique, challenging and visually gifted directors working in the world today. He exploded onto the international scene with his Tetsuo: The Iron Man and hasn’t looked back since, building a loyal and ravenous following for his work around the globe. Envisioned as his own spin on the horror serials that he loved as a child the Nightmare Detective films manage the difficult feat of being some of the auteur’s most accessible work while also retaining that unique, experimental edge that mark them clearly and totally as his own. Nobody else could make these films.
In the original Nightmare Detective Kagenuma – played by Ryuhei Matsuda – followed a typical heroic path, matched early on against an evil villain – played by Tsukamoto himself – of similar powers in a deadly cat and mouse game. But for this second entry in the series Tsukamoto takes a very different approach. Nightmare Detective 2 has no true villain to speak of. There are strange occurrences, to be sure, and a puzzle to be solved but that puzzle lies within Kagenuma himself as he struggles to understand himself and his own past. Though he takes on Mashiro’s case he does so only because there are certain parallels between it and his mother’s tragic life and he hopes that by understanding the girl who appears in Mashiro’s dreams he will also come to understand his own history.
As far as is possible with Tsukamoto, Nightmare Detective was an outward looking film, a film that established a pair of opposing characters and set them to do battle with one another. Nightmare Detective 2, however, looks entirely inwards. Now that he has established his character Tsukamoto sets about dissecting him and if there has ever been a director better suited to capturing anxiety, dread and the ominous quasi-logic of dreams up on the big screen than Tsukamoto then I have no idea who that may be. The film is loaded with beautiful yet troubling imagery and exists in the strange state that lies somewhere between sleeping and wakefulness. Like all of Tsukamoto’s best work it is a film less to be understood than it is to be experienced – you feel the truth of it, you don’t think it.
Early in his career viewers latched on to the body modification aspects of Tsukamoto’s work, hailing him a cyberpunk visionary, but as he has progressed it has become clear that he is much more than that. Tsukamoto is a poet of pain and alienation, constantly returning to characters on the absolute utter fringes of society, characters forced to deal with death and loss. Nightmare Detective 2 clearly returns the director to these themes and like his work in Vital and A Snake Of June offers his characters a path through to the other side. It is a difficult path, to be sure, but it is one worth walking. Though he is now working on a new and unrelated project I certainly hope this is not the last we will see of this complex and troubling character.