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Director: Kensuke Sonomura
Stars: Akari Takaishi, Masanori Mimoto
Distributor:Blue Finch Films UK

“There is a way to exercise you?”

From director Kensuke Sonomura comes a literal out of body experience… As high a concept as they come in the human form; a WILD journey combining the forces of life and death.

For Fumika (Akari Takaishi), life is bland and miserable when bouncing between dead end shifts and dead end dates, but it could be worse: she could be like Kudo (Masanori Mimoto) who actually is dead. On the chance occasion that Fumika encounters a spent case on the floor, she not only engages with it, but she enables it as a portal for her body to become host to Kudo, a murdered assassin.

To a degree, Fumika and Kudo represent the best of both worlds; an honest worker and a (former) hired assassin. However, their respective personalities are far from the expectations of their roles in society. Whilst Fumika is tough and deserving of better, Kudo – whilst tough – is not the ruthless and emotionless killer we come to expect. Beyond life and death, the contrasting characters of Fumika and Kudo excel in the encouragement of the other to develop and succeed.

Ghost Killer can, essentially, be split into three chapters: the initial spectacle and rules of possession; intro and dive into the crime world of the film; big showdown in conclusion to what was shown prior. Now, the big struggle when viewing is that the first chapter of sorts is by far the most engaging and intriguing, whereas, come the all-important gun-blazing conclusion: the spectacle has worn off and the story does feel somewhat convoluted. Though the gradual decline is unfortunate, ultimate, it fails to overshadow and diminish the genuine exciting quality experienced beforehand and earlier on.

Not exclusive or limited to the first few instances, but the fight sequences throughout are truly incredible. The shift and upgrade in both cinematography and choreography is sublime. Not just Matrix esque, but genuinely jaw-dropping at times. All in all, the execution of this is made possible by its characters and the respective performances. The hardest hitting of character relationships comes in the presence of, literally, its central pairing of ghost and host: Kudo and Fumika.

Ultimately, one of Kensuke Sonomura’s greatest achievements with Ghost Killer is that there are very few glorifications of the subject or the backgrounds of the characters involved. The world of the film is socially and visually littered with grime and dirt. Organised crime is far from glamourous in this tale, and the honest work of a dead end job is not wholesome or character building, but just outright depressive. Male characters can vary from being violent to women or just outright sleazy, whilst the female characters are short-changed from the start, needing a supernatural presence to level-up in a world of filth.

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