Chaos

The wife of a rich businessman is kidnapped and a ransom is demanded. The plan appears to work. But the film does not tell the events in order: the same day is shown over and over, each time through somebody else's eyes. Every repetition throws up a detail we have not seen before, and that detail cancels the one before it. Who is deceiving whom keeps changing. Hideo Nakata had made Ringu in 1998 and introduced Japanese horror to the world; this film comes straight after it and is not horror but a pure game of structure. Miki Nakatani and Masato Hagiwara have the leads. A hundred and three minutes. The mould is the thriller, but the tension comes not from violence but from what the audience knows. Past a certain point the story becomes deliberately tiring, and the film's title says as much.