FREESIA: BULLETS OVER TEARS (Japan, 2007)
Directed by: Kazuyoshi Kumakiri
Starring: Tetsuji Tamayama, Tsoji Kokami

In a near future Japan, rage grips the country by the throat. Tempers constantly boil over, riot police are always on the move, every time the TV turns on it’s filled with reports of the dead and revenge has become a commodity. Licensed revenge agencies formally notify victims then execute them in sanctioned assassinations that proceed with all the impersonal efficiency of a city council meeting. This is the world of FREESIA a sci fi flick with brains – most of which wind up splattered all over the wall.

Another movie based on a manga, FREESIA starts with Mr. Kanou (Tetsuji Tamayama), a new hitman who’s fussy about his food and who barely notices the bullets that crease his hair. An Army weapons experiment amputated his emotions, robbing him of the ability to feel pain, and being a licensed revenge agent is a job where this gruesome weakness is twisted into a strength. As numb and devoid of affect as someone watching it all on TV, he looks like a sociopathic Clark Kent, and he’s obsessed with the memory of a young girl who was the only survivor of the weapons experiment that stole his feelings. Paced as deliberately as a killer stalking his victims, FREESIA is directed by Japan’s auteur of outrage, Kumakiri Kazuyoshi (Antenna, and the political gore fest Kikuchi), and its images of licensed assassins punching holes through skulls as impersonally as they’d stamp a form in triplicate is awesome in its hideousness. The killers in this movie are chilled to a sub-zero temperature, so cool that their eyes are crusted over with frost but they’re not the only ones. The entire world is numb, dead inside, unable to connect. “Scary, isn’t it?” one character asks. And the only answer is, yes, because tomorrow looks like today, only worse, and the whole world is an empty grave just waiting to be filled up with the corpses we make every day.