🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Ken’ichi Ugana
The horror-romance-comedy Love Will Tear Us Apart builds like a wave and crashes down with a gonzo fun final act. Endearing performances from child actors, and strong character arcs anchor this best-of-the-fest film from the 2023 Portland Horror Film Festival.
Love Will Tear Us Apart is something of a seven-layer cake of a film. Clever twists weave through this well-crafted story, enhancing the story with each passing era. Each layer of this horror cake adds character and texture. It builds off of a story of young love, with a bullying theme overlay. And, in horror movies, that is a cauldron from which no good can come from. As the years pass, the layers become wilder, but always reference back to the original sins.
Koki (Yuzu Aoki) is a quiet boy being taunted by his scurrilous schoolmates. Wakaba (Riko), a sweet girl whose home life features plenty of verbal abuse, defends Koki from the bullies. The pair become stronger together. They are a very cute and sweet couple, but even their mutual bond cannot stem that awful tide of bullying. The teacher is criminally absent, so it falls upon the children to exact justice. And justice comes crashing down HARD. It’s a bit of satisfying overkill.
Fast forward about six years and Wakaba (Sayu Kubota) is now a high schooler. Koki is now out of the picture, and his disappearance is a bit of an urban legend. She and her best friend Kanna go to a party in the woods (in a cabin, no less) with some of their mates who are aspiring rock stars. The outing becomes a bath of booze and sex, leaving Wakaba and Kana as uncomfortable outsiders. The fun stops abruptly, however, when a maniac in a gas mask and a machete butchers his way through the outing in a classic ’80s slasher homage. The killer leaves Wakaba and Kanna as the only survivors of the unfortunate party.
Wakaba fears that her childhood sweetheart may be at the bottom of this. Wakaba discovers, though, that this cannot be. Koki met a tragic end after he left school. Another jump forward in time puts Wakaba in Tokyo, where she attempts to rebuild her life. Unfortunately, the masked killer shows up and manages to destroy anybody who gets close to her. The mystery of the second and third acts is whether this killer is a supernatural phantom or a random lunatic who has taken a fancy to her.
Love Will Tear Us Apart has a great sense of humor, and mixes equal parts bloody mayhem and awkward goofiness. The final act denouement is both revelatory and unexpectedly gonzo. Again, this movie starts sweet and serene and builds into a flurry of surprising twists. The great thing is that the twists enhance the plot. They are essential in stitching the whole film together. The script barrels along, always teetering into not making sense, but managing to stay on track.
The Japanese, more than any other culture, revere cute things. The term kawaii really applies here, as the child actors are fantastic and adorable… even the bullies. You root for these endearing kids. All of the relationships are fun and the acting of the entire cast is done with comedic brio and earnestness. Sayu Kubota is more than just a pretty face, and when her puzzlement turns into proactive defense, she earns her final girl stripes. Also, these sweet relationships set the audience for the shocking turns that will happen. It’s disarming.
Japanese horror also loves over-the-top bloody mayhem, and this film delivers copious bloodletting. The timing of the slasher elements elevates the action from a generic serial killer fare, but as masked killers go, the gas-mask killer seems very much cut from My Bloody Valentine. The only other demerit is that if you are going to name your movie after a famous song, you need to use that song! Joy Division! Come on!
Love Will Tear Us Apart was shown at the Portland Horror Film Festival, where it won the Goul D’or award for the best feature of the festival, and it was well deserved. This film is still looking for a Western distributor, so it remains to be seen when it will be available for viewing in the US. This film, if released with an MPAA rating would earn a solid R for gore, violence, and a little bit of sexual content.
