The New York Asian Film Festival took place between June 29 and July 15 in Manhattan. For more information about films and events, click here.
I’ll admit it up front: I was not expecting to have to take this movie seriously.
When I saw the press photo they released, I knew I was going to see Inuyashiki. That was just an inevitability. But, judging from the photo (which you see above), I was very much expecting a wacky comedic take on superhero films, not unlike previous 2016 festival entry Hentai Kamen 2, but with a significantly less panty-focused narrative.
Instead, Inuyashiki is… a superhero movie. And a far more sober minded and thoughtful one than I had anticipated. I was surprised, but not unpleasantly.
It’s idiosyncratic in its themes and concerns, but at the end of the day it’s still playing pretty much the same game as Marvel and DC. And director Shinsuke Sato is a sure hand behind the camera, having accumulated a pretty thorough resume of live action manga adaptations.
But the points at which it diverges from the common tropes and its uniquely Japanese cultural perspective make it an interesting alternative vision.
When we first meet middle aged salaryman Inuyashiki Ichiro (Noritake Kinashi), he is truly the saddest of sad sacks. The lowest seller at his job (something involving sports drinks) and with a family that ignores him when they get tired of dismissing him. The only person who has any appreciation for him at all isn’t even a person, it’s a stray dog. Which his wife won’t even let him keep.
There’s a fair amount of Job-like suffering he has to go through before the thing happens that turns him from a zero to a hero (an incident the movie is blessedly uninterested in past its plot progressing fundamentals). And it does tend to get a little eye rolling right around the fifth time his spiteful brat of a daughter (Ayaka Miyoshi’s Mari, a good performance of a very unlikable character) greets him with sneering disdain. But these quotidian details build an unusually grounded reality that pay dividends when the more expected superhero action moments kick off.
But before we get to that part, there is first the long middle which constitutes some of the most interesting thematic material, and the stuff that keeps it from feeling quite as generic a hero story as it might have otherwise been. For Inuyashiki is a very different type of hero.
He is a healer.
Discovering he has the ability to cure disease and repair most injuries short of death, the beaten down man finds a sense of purpose in covertly restoring the suffering to health. He may still be a loser in the eyes of his family, but to the sick and dying, he is the “miracle worker.”
But it wouldn’t be much of a superhero movie without a villain, and so there is Hiro Shishigami (Takeru Sato).
Gifted the same powers but using them to very different, far more violent ends, Hiro sees himself as a god. But if he is a god, it’s one of destruction. And as such, conflict is inevitable with the so-called “miracle worker.”
But first, Hiro has his own journey to go on.
This, more than anything else, was the most fascinating part of the movie to me.
I think of our beloved Marvel movies, and everything they’ve done to find a balance between character and spectacle. Whereas previously superhero movies were campy, bloated exercises in studio neutering with dull protagonists ceding the entertainment ground to slumming big name actors collecting a paycheck and hamming it up royally —
(Actually that sentence got away from me a bit, please allow me to take a breath here…)
— Marvel put their energy into creating flawed, lovable heroes that more than held the center of their films.
Which they did at the cost of the villains, which up until recently came off as undercooked afterthoughts.
Necessary evils, if you will.
Inuyashiki, to its eternal credit, manages to give both its hero and villain the space they need to fully develop. Everything they do is a consequence of their earlier actions and experiences, and they’re allowed to grow and change as the film progresses, and not just in the ways that the story needs them to.
It all feels lived in, which is an unfortunately rare accomplishment in blockbuster cinema.
Hiro has an entire life and an entire arc that stands outside of his role as the eventual antagonist. His journey is just as riveting and interesting as our hero’s, and it makes the final conflict, a rocket powered series of chases and battles between a very reluctant fighter and an angry kid who no longer has anything to hold onto except for hate, pulse with an intimate sense of stakes that Marvel movies could actually learn a thing or two from.
I’m not going to try to oversell you on Inuyashiki. It is, at heart, a very traditional style superhero narrative. If you don’t like those kinds of movies, this isn’t going to change your mind. But for fans of this type of cinema, the differences are both fascinating and compelling.
