A desperately unpopular streamer with a dementia-stricken mother, a crooked cop, a duplicitous femme fatale, and a sack full of money collide in director Jojo Hideo's Beasts Clutching at Straws, an adaptation of the Sone Keisuke novel previously filmed by Korean filmmaker Kim Yong-hoon in 2020.
Kanji (Ouji Suzuka) works the reception desk at an internet cafe, but his real passion is streaming fresh content for a following of over a dozen local college students. While cleaning up a private booth after a mysterious patron skips the bill, he stumbles onto a sack full of cash, one hundred million yen to be exact. Being a dutiful employee, he puts it with the other items in the lost and found, but it isn't too long before his desperate situation at home pressures him to start chipping away at the money. His grandmother is ill with dementia since his grandfather passed and she has inadvertently frittered away what little savings they had, putting their survival on the line. But with this free money laying around, it seems like everything is going to be okay.
Elsewhere, Ebato, a crooked cop who is in debt up to his eyeballs with the local Yakuza, is equally eager to get out from under his potentially deadly burdens. A gullible school friend seems to be his ticket to financial freedom, but that all goes to hell when his former flame, Maria, appears on the scene. Maria is the reason Ebato was in debt in the first place, and her reappearance with a whole new bag of tricks could not have come at a worse time. Goda, the yakuza boss in question wants his money, and he wants it yesterday, throwing everyone into chaos with double and triple crosses being doled out left and right. Who will survive, and will it be worth it? It’s anyone’s guess as Beasts Clutching at Straws spirals out of control towards an ending that may not be completely unexpected, but it is satisfying.
Jojo Hideo cut his teeth in the Japanese AV industry, a not unfamiliar career path for journeymen filmmakers in the country. It seems to have taught him to be nimble and experimental in his construction of narrative as Beasts Clutching at Straws is nothing if not inventively assembled and executed. Told in what seems to be a series of parallel linear storylines, each following one main character’s travails with this duffel bag full of freedom, Beasts exhibits a playfulness that balances the dark tone of a film that is not afraid to throw a few buckets of blood around.
He utilizes unique zipper-wipe transition as we move from one story to another, essentially cluing the audience in to the fact that all of these stories are connected and will intersect at some point, but still manages to maintain an air of mystery about the particulars. Each time the screen goes black and the zipper begins at screen right moving toward the other edge of the screen, I could almost feel myself getting excited to see where the narrative was going to jump, and what surprises I was in for next. Though it’s not entirely successful at keeping some of its bigger secrets under wraps – a few significant twists are telegraphed a bit too clearly – for casual viewers, Beasts Clutching at Straws occasionally delivers those thrilling revelations that excited us back when Pulp Fiction was first making the rounds.
A splashy mix of pitch-black comedy, deadly serious gangster thriller, and salacious pulpy violence, Beasts Clutching at Straws pays homage to Japan’s noteworthy crime film legacy throughout, even staging a pivotal action sequence inside of a revival movie house showing a classic ‘70s Yakuza tale. It’s a knowing tribute to a genre that has managed to survive for decades as a linchpin of the Japanese film industry and one of the nation’s most recognizable cultural exports. Performances are solid across the board, with Kanji’s borderline feckless nature clashing against his more serious and devious counterparts across the film’s different strands in a way that makes their eventual confluence really fun to watch.
I have not seen the 2020 Korean adaptation, so I have no idea how much or if this version deviates from its elder sibling, but even if they are nearly identical – which I doubt is the case – there is enough craft and exciting energy in Jojo’s version to make it well worth seeking out.