‘Faceless’: Fugitive thriller turns a blind eye to hard truths

Fugitives in Japan enjoy a curious celebrity, their faces plastered on billboards and regularly featured in TV news segments. It’s a marvel that some of them manage to evade capture for so long. Suspected terrorist Satoshi Kirishima had been at large for nearly 50 years when he revealed his true identity in January, shortly before dying from cancer. Maybe it helped that the photo in his wanted poster — long-haired, fresh-faced and smiling — didn’t look like someone who was a menace to society.

In Michihito Fujii’s “Faceless,” a convicted murderer played by Ryusei Yokohama goes on a year-long, cross-country flight from justice. The people he encounters invariably come away convinced of his innocence. Why? Because he’s a nice guy.

He’s also hot, which is a liability in a film with a title like this (the original Japanese, “Shotai,” translates literally as “true identity”). Someone as dishy as Yokohama would never manage to go unnoticed for long, even with the range of disguises that his character adopts.

He plays Keiichi Kaburagi, a young man sentenced to death for the brutal killings of a family of three, based on the shaky testimony of the sole survivor, a grandmother suffering from dementia (Hideko Hara). After pulling off an audacious (if implausible) escape from custody, he goes on the lam, pursued by the detective who originally put him behind bars, Seigo Matanuki (Takayuki Yamada).

Keiichi’s flight takes him first to a construction site in Osaka, where he strikes up a cautious friendship with a coworker, Kazuya (Shintaro Morimoto). After his cover gets blown, he moves on to Tokyo and finds work as a freelance writer — as well as a place to stay, courtesy of his editor, Sayaka (Riho Yoshioka). All the while, he’s amassing evidence that might prove he’s innocent of a crime he insists he didn’t commit.

A wrongly accused man trying to clear his name while staying one step ahead of the law? Yes, it’s basically “The Fugitive” with a younger protagonist. I’m not sure if Fujii is cheekily referencing the 1993 Harrison Ford movie when he sends Keiichi leaping into thin air to escape his antagonist, but it makes for a good scene either way. “Faceless” also recalls real-life fugitives such as Lindsay Ann Hawker’s killer, Tatsuya Ichihashi, without forcing the audience into the uncomfortable position of having to empathize with a villain.

The film’s 2020 source novel by Tamehito Somei has already been adapted as a four-part TV series on Wowow. Fujii’s version, co-written with Kazuhisa Kodera, fillets the story down to a compact running time without sacrificing coherence. Some of its feats of compression are extreme — the breathless opening sequence feels more like a trailer for the movie you’re about to watch — but Fujii is also careful to leave a little breathing space where it matters.

For the most part, “Faceless” is a gripping and slickly produced thriller, at least until it loses its bearings at the end. Like the TV drama, Fujii chooses not to use the novel’s more downbeat ending. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that the film’s faith in Japan’s judicial system doesn’t square with real-life miscarriages of justice. Former death row inmate Iwao Hakamata waited over 40 years to secure a retrial, but that’s the kind of truth that audiences might find hard to face.