Review: Red Snow

3

Worth A Look

An engagingly shot drama about past crimes that is true to its title, even if that means leaving us feeling a little bit cold by the end.

Sayaka Kai’s debut feature RED SNOW (赤い雪) is a mystery thriller that it very conscious about its style. Having previously earned an Honourable Mention at the Skip City International D-Cinema Festival for the short film Ondine’s Curse, writer/director Kai continues to explore her characters by dealing in vignettes.

Through fragmented point-of-view imagery, we bear witness to a boy running through the snow with a sense of foreboding about it. We later learn that is from the day that boy went missing, and his older brother Kazuki Shirakawa (Masatoshi Nagase) has always blamed himself for it. Three decades later, reporter Shogo Kodachi (Arata Iura) investigates the disappearance and encounters Sayuri Eto (Nahana), the daughter of the kidnapping suspect.

Told through the filter of memory – known for being a notoriously unreliable narrator – Sayaka Kai takes a fragmentary storytelling approach to her first feature screenplay. Cutting between time periods and perspectives, the technique is designed to slowly unveil the mystery before us, along with reminding us of the subjective nature of truth. Yet this is done in such a disjointed manner: one minute we’re discovering something about “the night of the fire,” the next it (repeatedly) cuts away to a fetishistic series of sex scenes. So much so that the puzzle is more about what is going on rather than the crucial why.

RED SNOW is positively laden with visual meaning and metaphor, so much so that the first four minutes of the film are dialogue free and cloaked in a blurred haze. The first dialogue comes as we witness ceramics being carefully crafted in close-up. “Lacquer should be like snow. Melting away in the palms of your hands.” To hammer the point home, there’s loving shots of kilns and pottery –  in between the random sexy cutaways, of course.

Futa Takagi’s photography ties it all together stylistically with some crisp, albeit frequently bleak, sequences shot in and around snowscapes. It all culminates in a series of chilling sequences (pun not intended, at least not originally) set in the snow.

RED SNOW bookends the film with another silent and fog-shrouded shot, although it is hard to know what to feel at this point. There’s a complex mystery to be had here, perhaps aiming for something along the lines of Rage. It just feels as though there were a few missed opportunities here.

2019 | Japan | DIR: Sayaka Kai| WRITERS: Sayaka Kai | CAST: Masatoshi Nagase, Arata Iura, Nahana | DISTRIBUTOR: ARK Entertainment (JPN), JAPAN CUTS (US) | RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 1 February 2019 (JPN), 19 – 28 July 2019 (JAPAN CUTS)