Actualités

When two criminals—Kawanishi (Nishimura Kô) and Sabu (Murota Hideo)—first force their way into Misawa’s (Mikuni Rentarô) home, the middle-class salaryman bolts up from his bathtub, standing before his assailants nude and covered in bubbles. This darkly humorous moment lends a bit of levity to the first of many chaotic sequences in Fukasaku Kinji’s The Threat, but more importantly, it speaks to the near-comical, childlike vulnerability of the film’s kowtowing protagonist, who goes from finding an equally spineless underling at work who’s willing to marry his boss’s mistress to complying with every order given by his captors without resistance.

What follows is a remarkably tense and claustrophobic home invasion thriller, in which Misawa becomes the middleman between Kawanishi and a wealthy man, Sakata (Mitsuda Ken), whose infant he and the younger, more impulsive Sabu kidnapped before breaking into Misawa’s house. But coursing just...