RETRIBUTION (Japan, 2006)
Directed by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring: Koji Yakusho, Manami Konishi, Jo Odagiri
“Retribution is the Mulholland Drive of his particular brand of horror. – TwitchFilm.net

Aren’t we all sick of J-horror by now? From The Ring to Ju-On and beyond it doesn’t matter how good these movies may be, there are just too many of them and they just aren’t scary anymore. Is there anything anyone can do that’s new with this genre? Yes, actually. Leave it to Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse, Cure, Doppelganger) to dredge up the bloated, water-logged corpse of the J-horror trend from the bottom of the river and to chop it up into something evil that slithers into your brain like a maggot worming its way into your brain.

Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance, just about every Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie ever made, Babel) plays a cop who’s under so much pressure that he’s starting to split at the seams. As earthquakes rattle Tokyo he starts to believe that he might just be the prime suspect in a series of unsolved murders featuring drowned bodies  that are turning up all over Tokyo. With a plot that keeps turning back on itself, a spectral, ear-splitting shriek that slashes through the celluloid and set in a city that looks like a muddy, abandoned junk heap, RETRIBUTION is a surgical strike on our fear centers. Produced by Taka Ichise, the man responsible for the slash-and-burn tendencies of the J-horror trend, RETRIBUTION is a movie that side-steps every expectation and delivers an actual scary film. It’s a masterpiece of technique from a director who has spent decades honing his scalpel.