Survive Style 5+

A man kills his wife and buries her; she keeps coming back. An advertising executive gets lost inside her own ideas. A stage hypnotist turns a father into a bird and cannot turn him back. An English hitman in Japan asks everyone the same question: what is your function. Gen Sekiguchi directed. He came from commercials and music videos, and the form shows it in every frame. The cast includes Tadanobu Asano, Reika Hashimoto, Kyoko Koizumi and, as the hitman, the former footballer Vinnie Jones. Four stories run in parallel and only touch at the end. What connects them is not plot but tone: each takes its own absurdity completely seriously. Colour, set design and music are the real subject. Every space is overdesigned; the scenes work like advertising aesthetics carried into cinema. It found a cult audience outside Japan and did little business at home. Who it is for: viewers who like absurd, visually excessive Japanese films. Who it is not for: anyone seeking meaning and coherence; the film never promises either.