In I, the Executioner (1968), there's little room for complacency. The opening frame—a woman's face, locked in silent terror as she faces an off-screen assailant—sets the tone for a particularly distressing picture, one that begins with an expressionistic montage of sexual violence and only delves deeper into the mechanisms behind human misery. Certainly, this isn't a film for those of a gentle disposition.
Japanese director Tai Kato was (and largely still is) an unknown outside of Japan, his name only whispered amongst cult cinephiles and genre lovers. Most renowned for his yakuza films at the home of all things B-movie, the Toei Company, Kato was particularly prolific during the 1950s and 1960s, a time in which he developed a reputation for his bloody period Jidaigeki swordplay features. Filmed in the late ‘60s and set in modern Japan, I, the Executioner represented somewhat of a genre shift for Kato, a grizzly noir that interrogated contemporary social structures while retaining the same hard-boiled viewpoint as his earlier work.
The brutal rape and murder that opens the film is the first of five, each of which are seemingly connected to the earlier suicide of a young laundry boy. But rather than shadowing the police, who are generally presented as effete and slovenly, we spend most of our time with the serial killer himself, following him as he stalks the various women while also simultaneously pursuing an ostensibly sweet romance with a barmaid (who, of course, has her own chequered past). As each cycle of violence begins anew, and the investigators continue to let the killer slip through their fingers, the weight of the world comes to bear on all involved. For a film that prompts its audience to unpick its central mystery from the start, it's no surprise to find it cut through with human sadness.
What's most striking as a newcomer to Kato's work is his style, each frame speaking to a consistent and easily recognisable cinematic language. There's the front-and-centre dramatic interplay of black and white, in which the piercing spot lighting making figures slip in and out of the shadows on a dime. There's Kato's signature extreme low angles, that take the same ground level perspective Ozu employed, the so-called “Tatami shot”, and invert it, gazing up at the heavens rather than directly at the people around them (the Kenta Fukasaku interview included in this Radiance releases offers some great further insights there). And, as seen below, there are an evocative series of tight close ups, in which the audience's attention is placed as much on the out-of-focus world around the subject as it is on their glistening brows or quivering eyes.
If such a stylish feature seems at odds with the real-world horrors informing the film's narrative—specifically the ritualistic assault and murder of women—it works great in practice, Kato using his craft to scrutinise the conditions that breed such a monster and the mentality it takes to commit heinous act after heinous act. Each killing is rendered in fragmented cuts, leaving space for the audience to fill in the gaps between the flashes of violence with more ripped-from-the-headlines brutality. The film's multiple flashbacks to the movie's inciting events almost look hand processed: double exposed, flicked with random noise, and with the whites all blown out. Likewise, the score frequently gives way to experimental sonic landscapes, a chorus of women's screams distorted until they sound like screeching trains. It's a frequently hellish experience, undoubtedly, but one that intimately understands the clash between those free to indulge in the comforts of post-war life and those forced into an observation of loss. A must watch.
Special Features
- High-Definition digital transfer
- Uncompressed mono PCM audio
- A Serial History – a visual essay on Japanese serial killer films by Jim Harper and Tom Mes (2023, 16 mins)
- Appreciation by filmmaker Kenta Fukasaku (2023, 20 mins)
- Trailer
- Newly translated English subtitles
- Reversible sleeve featuring original newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow
- Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Tony Rayns and a new translation of archival writing on the film
- Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings
I, the Executioner releases in the UK on January 29th courtesy of Radiance Films
