This is the second vertical AI BL drama I've sat through, and honestly I went in knowing better. I had it on while I was doing cardio at the gym, and what struck me was just how much the plot echoed the last one I watched. Same step brother romance angle, same mystery girlfriend showing up near the end, same extra guy pining after one of the leads. Genuinely the only thing going for it was the runtime, the whole thing wrapped up in forty five minutes flat. The setup kicks off with Finn moving schools because his mom just married into money. He finds out his new step brother Aiden goes to the same place, and he's warned to keep his distance from him. Their first run in at school is rocky, just like you'd expect, but there's this odd pull between them neither can shake off. Finn keeps telling himself not to read into it because Aiden's straight and openly homophobic. Things shift when some kids start bullying Finn and the student council president, Ryan, steps in to ...
The film starts with a double murder of a couple. The police has a primary suspect, one Yamaguchi, a young man with a history of disturbed behavior but his whereabouts are unknown. Also it later emerges that he may have cosmetic surgery done, so the media is all over trying to find the culprit. A few month after this attack, three different men surface out of nowhere in three different settings and the film follows their paths and people around them fearing that the guy might be the killer. In the first one, we see two teenagers discovering a slight creepy and leanly backpacker squatting in a former military bunker on one small, otherwise uninhabited island. In the second situation, a father has just rescued his daughter from an abusive sex-worker situation. But when she falls for a loner new man in town, he gets uneasy and starts wondering if this man, who they know nothing about could be the killer. In the third setting, Tokyo resident Yuma is gay and sleeps around with men. He surprises himself one day when he brings home a trick from bathhouse whom he knows nothing about. What’s more, he’s soon introducing him to his terminally ill mother, and otherwise treating the close-mouthed youth like a real boyfriend, who is otherwise a very quiet and shy person. With television news coming in with more details and the boyfriend suddenly disappearing, Yuma questions if that man could be the killer.
The storytelling in unique, because these different stories have nothing to do with each other. Yes, the police is looking for the suspect, but it feels that the film is more about human connection and trust. As all three suspected men grow closer an intimate with strangers who have trusted them and taken them in, there is also an element of distrust when the suspects pictures being shown on TV somehow bear some resemblance to each of these individual people. The film does get a bit soppy in last half an hour and can do with some tighter editing. As expected, I was personally more interested in the gay storyline, which was quite interesting. Yuma brings a reckless charm to his role as a gay man battling his own form of identity disguise; his suspicion of his boyfriend says more about him than it does about his lover. Also, what was up with the introductory scene of Yuma almost raping the poor guy. IN fact, it feels all three stories did have something common in terms of sexual assault. The ending is something that you may or may not agree with whether one of these killers was really the killer, but it does make for an interesting movie experience watch with beautiful locations.
With some great acting and direction, and gorgeous photography, this film is a decent watch. Just don't go into it thinking you are going to watch a gay film. That just happens to be a small subset of the overall film being presented. (5.5/10)
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