Critical acclaim for Kiyoshi Kurosawa was in short supply for the earliest 20 years of his career, with his name going all but unheard in the film community. That all changed in 1997 when his brooding and enigmatic breakthrough CURE took the world by storm. Since then he has crafted a number of genre-defying meditations, ranging from the bizarre modern romance BARREN ILLUSIONS [1999] to the unlikely slapstick comedy DOPPELGANGER [2003]. He has even suffered the gravest of Hollywood transgressions in having his 2001 effort KAIRO remade as the lackluster fright-romp PULSE. His 2006 production of SAKEBI, newly released to DVD in the USA by Lions Gate under its international title RETRIBUTION, is a triumphant return by Kurosawa to the gritty existential horror that made him an international star.

The film begins in familiar territory - a man, his features obscured by the night, pursues a woman in a red dress across a nondescript bit of land. He catches her, throws her to the ground, and unceremoniously drowns her in a puddle. The police are quick to discover the body, and troubled detective Yoshioka (Kurosawa regular Koji Yakusho) is called in on the case along with this more traditional partner Miyaji (Tsuyoshi Ihara). It is discovered that the woman drowned in a puddle of sea water, which had leached up from the ground after one of many recent earthquakes in the area. There is little evidence to be had at the scene and no positive identification of the body is made - in fact, the only piece of evidence Yoshioka stumbles upon is of a self-incriminating kind: in a puddle near the victim he finds a button that seems to belong to one of his own overcoats . . .

Soon circumstantial evidence seems to be piling up around the detective - his fingerprint is found on the nail of the victim ("Did you touch the body without gloves again?") and her arms and legs were bound using cable just like the kind used to wire his decrepit apartment. Even more troubling is the apparition of the woman in the red dress, stalking Yoshioka and leaving him questioning his own possible guilt - could he have killed the woman without knowing it?

As earthquakes rumble through the city more murder cases start cropping up. A doctor kills his own son after finding him too uncontrollable ("It was impossible to change him back to how he was") while a secretary kills her boss and lover even as he makes plans to divorce his wife and start a new life with her. Disturbingly, all the cases present the same MO - the victims were all drowned in sea water. Detectives are at a loss to find any sort of connection between the slayings until Yoshioka stumbles upon a frightening revelation - all of the killers seem to be experiencing similar encounters with the ghostly woman in the red dress. A timely break comes for Yoshioka when the body of the young woman in the first case is identified and her killer brought to justice. The celebration is short lived, however, as the detective comes to realize that the victim discovered in the puddle may not be the haunting woman in red at all . . .

SAKEBI (oddly the title has been translated to RETRIBUTION for release in the United States - the Japanese title more accurately translates to "scream" in English) is, as has already been mentioned, something of a return to familiar ground for the director. The story takes note of several of Kurosawa's earlier efforts, with the idea of similar but unrelated homicides belonging to CURE and the vengeful woman-in-red being a nod to both KAIRO (she effects society en masse) and SEANCE (her physical appearance, not to mention the way in which she behaves, is nearly identical to a ghost present briefly in that film). Thankfully the subtext of those earlier efforts has not been recycled here and those viewers wishing to look beyond SAKEBI's stylish horror trappings will find themselves deeply rewarded.

Isolation and abandonment in a society aimlessly progressing with little regard for the past or future is all-important here. The coastal area in which Yoshioka lives has been torn down and rebuilt a number of times in his life alone - so much blind change has taken place that he can't even remember the details of a ferry route he used to take every day only a decade earlier. The location where the first victim was discovered had been intended for condominiums, only to have that project forgotten after the land had been reclaimed from the sea. Even the detectives of the story (Yoshioka excluded) race from case to case, with little time spent on any one of them. Only Yoshioka connects the forgotten past, the ghost, and the murders at hand.

Kurosawa's eye for visuals remains as impressive as ever in SAKEBI - indeed, this may be his most beautifully captured film to date. Every image, from the entirely mundane to the utterly absurd, is framed and photographed as though it were the most important 1/24 of a second of the film - when watching a film like SAKEBI the love behind the lens really shows. Apocalyptic imagery is back in vogue - from the almost exclusive focus on the used and abused slices of society to the final shots of Yoshioka wandering through empty streets, one can't help but feel a certain dread about the future as the events of the film play out. This is another quiet film from Kurosawa and the sound design is in line more with that of CURE and CHARISMA than his other later projects. The understated audio leaves the audience wide open for the film's louder moments, and the shrieks of the woman in red are truly unsettling.

Koji Yakusho is a favorite here at WTFFILM and it's a real treat to see him take up the reigns again for what is, ostensibly, a darker version of the detective characters he portrayed in the earlier Kurosawa efforts CURE and CHARISMA. Unkempt, unshaven, and looking more than a little worse for wear, Yakusho's Yoshioka is perfectly suited to the broken world Kurosawa provides for him. Yakusho is quickly becoming for Kurosawa what Mifune and Nakadai were for his more famous contemporary - a fact that sits just fine with me. Tsuyoshi Ihara (of GAMERA: GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE fame) was a welcome sight as Yoshioka's partner Miyaji, and Riona Hazuki steals the show as the troubled and lonesome woman in red.

While some of the basic plot may seem, at first, to be recycled, the messages and ideas Kurosawa conveys with SAKEBI are as fresh as ever. The film encapsulates all of the director's cinema meanderings, from the family drama of AKARUI MIRAI to the straight horror of KAIRO to the absurd comedy of DOPPELGANGER and, as such, tends to be difficult to classify (though Lions Gate is clearly marketing it as horror - something that doomed Tartan's release of DOPPELGANGER from the start). SAKEBI is probably not going to do much for those looking for cheap thrills or popcorn entertainment, but it is an exceptionally crafted bit of genre-defying fiction just the same. It comes highly recommended.

The Lions Gate DVD of SAKEBI is satisfactory if not exceptional. The film itself is well represented in its original aspect ratio, anamorphically enhanced and progressive scan, at a bitrate of 7.47mb/s. The image is reasonably sharp with excellent colors and contrast, but a bit of edge enhancement is present throughout. Subtitles are generally fine but the translation is not up to the same level expected from companies like Criterion or Home Vision. Extras are rather limited, and include the originally intended ending for the film and a making-of segment for it as well as a brief question and answer session with the cast and director. The packaging is indicative of Lions Gate's decision to market SAKEBI strictly as a horror film - menu designs are underwhelming but get the job done (not all menu designs can be as brilliant as those for Home Vision's release of CURE back in 2003). This is a decent disc, but the retail price ($26.98) is a little high for what you're getting. WTFFILM recommends buying it used.