Inuyashiki

Shinsuke Sato's film is adapted from Hiroya Oku's manga. Ichiro Inuyashiki is fifty-eight, despised by his family, treated as worthless at work and newly diagnosed with stomach cancer. One night there is an unexplained collision in a park, and when he wakes his body has been entirely converted into machinery. Hiro Shishigami, a high school student who was in the same place that night, has undergone the same thing. The idea lies in what each does with it. Inuyashiki begins healing people; Shishigami begins killing them. They possess identical apparatus and the difference comes wholly from character. It inverts the superhero narrative: power changes nobody, it only exposes who they already were. Sato does not reduce the effects to a display, and the most affecting scenes are the ones in which Inuyashiki becomes a stranger to his own body. Who it is for: viewers who like manga adaptations and science fiction that carries a moral question. Who it is not for: anyone disturbed by the scale of the violence, since the massacres in the second half are heavy.