When you watch it at a moment when the most reported-on public rivalries see their opponents fume from the safety of their homes, 2003’s 2LDK feels extra punchy. Directed by Yukihiko Tsutsumi as part of what’s been called The Duel Project — a challenge from producer Shinya Kawai that dared Tsutsumi and another filmmaker, Ryuhei Kitamura, to each make a film almost completely taken up by a fight — the 70-minute movie is proportionally emotionally and physically brutal. 

In 2LDK, the women engaged in combat are 20-somethings Nozomi and Lana (Eiko Koike and Maho Nonami). Both are aspiring actresses who share an apartment; their frequent vying for the same parts has foiled anything resembling friendship or camaraderie. All they can see is what the other has that they would never admit to wanting. Nozomi considers herself a truer artist and is vexed by designer-brand-wearing Lana’s more status-minded view of their art and her apparent romantic ease. (It’s implied that Nozomi — prudish, introverted, and hailing from a small town — is still a virgin.) Lana thinks Nozomi needs to lighten up, but one can also sense that she’s a little envious of how Nozomi is taken slightly more seriously by industry men.

The pair’s mutual rancor will boil over in 2LDK. The movie entirely takes place in their spacious unit, which is presided over by a pet parrot left over from a fling who perches next to a grand piano, during the evening leading up to what’s expected to be a fateful phone call. Nozomi and Lana are about to find out if they’ve gotten a part; it just so happens that it’s the same one. It’s suggested that it could result in the kind of popular breakthrough for which both have been hungering.

Over the course of the night, the duo’s passive aggression slowly loses its passivity; outward calm starts to crack. Lana is the first to show signs of a slipping reality. She’s beleaguered with visions of a dead woman holding a dead baby in a bath, which is, we’ll learn, a manifestation of her guilt over some particularly disastrous home-wrecking. The two’s respective psychological fracturing escalates into physical brawling around the apartment, their methods of pain-infliction ranging from bathtub electrocutions to flung-around tea-kettle water. 

Cinematographer Satoru Karasawa and editor Nobuyuki Ito make the movie look extra visually busy during its stretches of fighting, more than probably to obscure the lack of any meticulously mapped-out fight choreography. But 2LDK doesn’t especially seem to have stealthy action-movie aspirations. It’s more compelled by how the destructiveness of violence ultimately displaces whatever potential catharsis might be felt when exercising it, and how often hatred rises from one’s projections and delusions rather than the realities of the person toward whom contempt is being directed. The movie’s bruisingly funny final words are a testament to both that and the corrosiveness of the entertainment industry’s treatment of actresses.