A chilling exploit in the matter-of-fact, this is Shohei Imamura's darkest, most exacting take on the societal loser. What's interesting is that for a serial killer film, the actual act of murder is neither rationalised or assigned routine justification. Formal mechanisms are applied, indicative of a cold distancing imposed through Imamura's treatment, a subject of which is based on fact. Modernism, it seems, has never felt so right, bereft of the show-pony camera tricks, moody under-lighting and sensationalist aesthetics that plague the serial killer movies of today; a genre now wholly desensitised and popularised by psychopaths, satanists, cannibals and insane intellectuals.

The murderer in Imamura's film, Iwao Enokizu, is like most of his downtrodden protagonists: an everyman, who just happens to partake in a 78-day killing spree. And while it's almost an obligation of commercial tendencies to embellish crime with an outrageous plot, exaggerated by twists and turns and an orgasmic payoff, Imamura offers no such gestures except for the failures of human nature. Enokizu is an ordinary person at best, and his killing is a reflection of that – terrible compulsions that he cannot explain or cure, but one's that he accepts with a resigned normality. Violent, dispassionate, and surprisingly non-didactic, this may just be the best serial killer film of its kind.—Tim Wong

» Shohei Imamura | Japan | 1979