While watching “Intimate Stranger,” Mayu Nakamura’s psychological thriller about a woman whose obsessive search for her missing son takes a strange and disturbing turn, it was hard not to think of “A Snake of June,” a 2002 erotic thriller by international cult director Shinya Tsukamoto.
One obvious reason: Asuka Kurosawa stars in both, though her troubled mother in “Intimate Stranger” seems to be worlds apart from her telephone counselor in “A Snake of June,” who is forced to live out the sexual fantasies of a stalker.
Despite the differences between these starring roles, and the two decades separating them, Kurosawa brings to both a presence that suggests depths of not only repressed desire but also darker emotional currents, especially in the new film. Finally, Nakamura’s muted color palette, which reinforces the film’s air of separation and alienation from the outside world, recalls the chilly, silvery black-and-whites that underlined the unsettling isolation of Tsukamoto’s protagonist.