Melancholic

Kazuhiko, a graduate of a respected university, has taken no pleasure in his life until he gets a job at a bathhouse. Then he learns that after closing hours the place is used for killing people. The film gives that discovery not as material for suspense but as the man being forced to decide what he will do. The account holds comedy and crime inside the same frame and does not make the violence showy. The daily work at the bathhouse, the cleaning and the order of it, take up most of the scenes. Kazuhiko’s ordinariness is the story’s real tension. Yoji Minagawa plays the lead in Seiji Tanaka’s hundred and fourteen minute Japanese film, completed in 2019.