Oudai Kojima manages to do a lot with comparatively little. The director’s debut feature, “Joint” (2021), was a self-financed crime drama shot on a piddling budget but delivered with the style and confidence of a Michael Mann film.
His follow-up is even more ambitious: a character study of a traumatized former soldier that morphs into a politically charged thriller interrogating the contradictions in Japan’s postwar defense policy — once again executed with minimal resources. Kojima poses awkward questions about the role of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) and the country’s increasingly tenuous claim to be a pacifist nation, even if his handling of these issues can get a bit muddled.
During a 2016 peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, SDF sergeant Tosuke Shimada (Ikken Yamamoto) gets caught in a skirmish during which he’s forced to shoot a child soldier, while one of his comrades is left dead and another goes missing in action. After being coerced into helping cover up the incident (which was inspired by real-life events), Tosuke returns to Japan a broken man. Plagued by PTSD, he works as a welder while earning extra cash making guns for the black market.
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