A chilling exploit in the matter-of-fact, this is Shohei Imamura's darkest, most exacting take on the societal loser. What's interesting is that for a serial killer film, the actual act of murder is neither rationalised or assigned routine justification. Formal mechanisms are applied, indicative of a cold distancing imposed through Imamura's treatment, a subject of which is based on fact. Modernism, it seems, has never felt so right, bereft of the show-pony camera tricks, moody under-lighting and sensationalist aesthetics that plague the serial killer movies of today; a genre now wholly desensitised and popularised by psychopaths, satanists, cannibals and insane intellectuals.