If you’ve been reading the site or know anything about Takashi Miike, the guy is the definition of prolific. The Japanese director has had quite a career so far, easily churning out at least three movies a year with his early work focused on crazy splatterific thrillers while his more recent films have spanned the gamut including everything from period action pieces to family friendly manga adaptations. His latest work to make it stateside, an adaptation titled Lesson of the Evil, is a return to his roots in that it is q bloody, violent, clever, and even humorous thriller.
Mr. Hasumi (Hideaki Ito) is a relatively new teacher at an elite high school and seems to be loved by all. He’s fun, charismatic and full of ideas to help keep cheating in class down to a minimum but he harbors a dark secret, he’s a bit homicidal. Through a web of deceit, blackmail, and eventually murder, Mr. Hasumi will do anything to keep his students in check and to have the upper hand when it comes to dealing with bullying and bad student behavior. As the film progresses, we recognize that Mr. Hasumi is working towards something and eventually, during an overnight art project, his homicidal nature explodes in such a way that conservative members of an American audience would likely riot over, but for fans of Miike this is completely normal.
First and foremost, Lesson of the Evil is a bad ass film and probably my favorite of this year’s NYAFF (granted I did miss a couple key films). What’s cool about it is that not only is it is 128 minutes of twists, turns and unpredictability, but you also get to see how the mind of a sociopath operates, functions and slowly sets everyone up in the movie until he is ready to execute his grand finale. The pacing is well managed and thankfully the film continually adds a twisted layer upon layer to keep you engaged and your curiosity piqued. For those who have seen Stoker, this film takes a pretty different approach to the sociopath but does highlight the similarities in the personality of one.
Miike does a great job of showing off Hasumi’s two faces. By day he is this likable English language teacher and by night he works out and sleeps naked in his shack located in the woods while being kept company by two crows who he has named Huginn and Muninn after the Norse God Odin’s crows. At the same time, as he explore Husami’s personality, we also get to see the film through the eyes of some of the students and how a handful of them are skeptical of Husami’s motives thanks to the lack of hatred from a really weird teacher who started looking into Husami’s past. This is where some of the simple random humor comes into play.
SPOILER As hinted at in the synopsis, Mr. Hasumi basically goes on an all out massacre mission in the high school, using a shotgun to kill every single one of his students. It is a wild final 40 minutes and one that thriller fans and Miike fans alike will love. What makes the film scary is how pleasant Mr. Hasumi is as he goes on this rampage and how funny some of the deaths are, but I guess that’s what happens with a Japanese film about a sociopath. Hasumi also walks around whistling Mack the Knife, which is the perfect song to compliment the film for various symbolic reasons that you can easily figure out. The only problem, from an American stand point, is the timing as I’m sure there are still people in Newtown, Connecticut still grieving over the killing of elementary school children, but could you imagine if this was American film, what kind of headlines this film would make? End Spoiler
Fans of Miike’s earlier work will be happy with the results of this bloody sociopathic film. It’s a movie that gets you more and more excited as time goes on because you don’t know exactly what Hasumi or Miike have up their sleeves, you just know something big is coming. The best way I would describe this film is it’s Stoker meets Battle Royale, lots of kids dying but this time it’s at the hands of a deeply homicidal man who has no intentions of ever yielding. If you are looking for a cool foreign film to watch and have exhausted all the cool classic bloody thrillers of the past 10 years then make Takashi Miike’s Lesson of the Evil next on your list, you won’t be disappointed.
Rating: A blood soaked psychopathic thriller that continually gets better as the movie progresses (7/10)
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