समाचार

Murakawa Tôru’s The Beast to Die begins with a flurry of violence as a man, Date (Matsuda Yûsaku), murders a cop and a band of gangsters with equal indifference. For the rest of the film, Date progresses through a series of assaults and robberies with an impulsiveness that jars with the seeming absence of pleasure that he experiences. Only in its closing stretch does the film suggest a motive for Date’s actions, but by then the accumulated horror of his crime spree has cast any sense of meaning adrift.

Date’s nebulous connection to the world around him extends to scenes of his more quotidian daily activities. The only thing that we see the man take any interest in is classical music, and in an early scene that has the makings of a meet-cute, he strikes up a conversation in a record store with a woman (Kobayashi Asami...