In Retribution (2006), a detective (Kōji Yakusho) looks into a murder unsure whether he’s the one who committed it. He was sleeping, or so he believes, at the time the victim, a woman in red, was drowned in a puddle in a vacant industrial yard by a man whose face the film obscures. But later, the investigator’s fingerprints are found at the crime scene, alongside a button from the coat he wears most days. The possibility of him being able to write either off as a coincidence becomes particularly hard after a ghost, who looks, with her red rainjacket, an awful lot like the woman around which his world now orbits, starts haunting him.
As it goes for most of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s horror movies, whether Retribution adequately fulfills conventional genre expectations is not often top of mind. The film is undoubtedly frightening, in the way 1997’s Cure and 2001’s Pulse were, but more striking about what Kurosawa does is his canny ability to encapsulate feelings of urban loneliness, and how adept he is at underscoring the wasteful ugliness of violence more generally.
Kurosawa prefers to shoot in long takes — keep his cameras stock still and only a short distance away from characters. He evokes the feeling of stasis, cosmic indifference one feels when one finds oneself overwhelmed with a sense of alienation. When the seemingly senseless violence introducing Retribution starts to take the shape of an epidemic, where similar murders are committed by people with grievances most would either absorb or walk away from, that sensation is only reinforced. This is a community collectively driven mad by the pains they ordinarily would just keep to themselves.
By portraying violence with the immobility of a surveillance camera dutifully documenting what it was built to, Kurosawa’s scenes showing unfathomable violence become more affecting. The way the movies tend to stylize brutality can have a dehumanizing effect. Kurosawa’s refusal to recapitulate that stylization, in contrast, adds the sort of gravity so many horror movies don’t themselves have. (Such is partially why the murder that opens the film leaves you rattled as long as it does.) Fans of the genre usually don’t expect too much more from their horror movies than thrills. But Retribution, like so many of Kurosawa’s other movies, just makes you sad about the cruelty people are capable of and the indifferent world in which they perform it.
Peterson Reviews 