After being attacked by an axe-wielding, mask-wearing assailant, lawyer Akira Ninomiya (Kazuya Kamenashi) sets out to discover who is behind the attack. Meanwhile, detectives Inui (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) and Toshiro (Nanao) are on the trail of the same man who is responsible for a series of slayings in which he took the victims’ brains. The mystery deepens when they discover that all of the victims had a neurochip implant.
Based on a novel by Mayusuke Kurai, with a screenplay by Hiroyoshi Koiwai, “Lumberjack the Monster” is a gory crime thriller with elements of gothic horror directed by Takashi Miike. The prologue set in a large, dimly-lit mansion, with kidnappers experimenting on children and barrels containing the dismembered pre-adolecent corpses of former failed experiments, sets up the dark tone of what is to follow. The film slips between glossy, brightly lit environments and the gloomy underbelly of this society, perfectly visualising the themes of duality in human nature. Kazuya Kamenashi gives a good performance as Ninomiya, a villainous protagonist who displays psychopathic tendencies, working well alongside Shota Sometani’s Sugitani, a doctor who is even more psychologically perverse than Ninomiya, having no qualms about performing fatal experiments on animals and humans alike. Similarly Kiyohiko Shibukawa and Nanao as Inui and Toshiro have good chemistry together as an old-school detective, recently demoted due to attacking a suspect, and a modern behavioural science graduate whose insights and deductive capacity prove invaluable yet frustrating to her partner. The plot may be slightly far-fetched, and later on the holes start to grow wider, but the film manages to hold things together until a final act that provides enough emotional weight to sink any flaws in the logic.
“Lumberjack the Monster” is an intriguing film, part crime thriller, part modern retelling of a traditional folktale. Throughout we hear narration of a children’s book of the same title, telling the story of a monster disguised as a lumberjack. The plot of the book often mirrors the actions of the killer in the film, as well as Ninomiya, and provides an explanation of the themes of the film. One flaw of the film is that it confuses the definition of psychopath as a person who seems to delight in killing and has an insatiable appetite for murder. That being said, the film posits several interesting ideas, regarding personality augmentation, the extent to which people bear responsibility for their actions, and the possibility of forgiveness for even the most horrific crimes. While masked in a near-future, science-fiction, quasi-gothic folklore, the film nevertheless is strikingly relevant to the fields of criminology and forensic psychology. Well worth a watch for fans of slightly outrageous gory crime films.
