Screening in competition at this year's Venice Film Festival, "Killing" is veteran provocateur Shinya Tsukamoto's first venture into the samurai genre. Made, like most of Tsukamoto's films, on a tiny budget and tight schedule, it does not attempt the scale of classics like "Seven Samurai" (1954) or "Yojimbo" (1961).
Instead, Tsukamoto's camera moves in close to capture the weight of the swords, the razor lethality of the blades and the swirling chaos of the action. Some of the fight scenes, with their slowly gathering menace and swift death, recall Akira Kurosawa's afore-mentioned masterpieces, but Tsukamoto's overall approach is more intimate and less heroic. As he has said in interviews, the film is the antithesis of the classic samurai movie, in which good battles evil. Much like his 2014 World War II film "Fires on the Plain," with its anti-war message, "Killing" questions the deadly violence that is the genre's bedrock.
How, the young samurai Mokunoshin Tsuzuki (Sosuke Ikematsu) asks himself, can one man bring himself to kill another? Expert with the sword, he hesitates to use it even when his life and honor are at stake.