Jmovie: Akumu Tantei / Nightmare Detective (2007)

Rating: 4/6
Creepy, dark and macabre are the words that spring to my mind when I think of this movie. It's not awesome, but it's pretty good and still somehow one of my favorites.

The movie is about a mystery of several people killing themselves brutally in their sleep, and all of them called 0 before doing so. A female detective named Keiko Kirishima is trying to solve this mystery, and asks Kagenuma for help. He’s a guy who can go into peoples dreams. 

The acting is perhaps not the best part of the movie though, especially not the female detective, who is often spacing out in a way that makes her seem a bit retarded.
I guess she’s supposed to be sleep deprived, but if I were that sleep deprived I would stay at home…
The nightmare detective is oozing negativity in a way which makes it seem like he’s spewing it out in all directions. (Ryuhei Matsuda has serious emo skills.) But maybe anyone would be a bit like that in such a situation.
Together they create the Depressive Duo, and it definitely helps with the already dark mood of the movie. 

Not that it needs it, as the theme is suicide and the filming is having the typical gloomy look you might expect from a movie like this. 

The whole suicide thing is the red thread going through. Do they want to die, do they not want to die? And it’s especially interesting when the main characters are so clearly depressed from the start. 

The nightmare parts are freaking me out, and it’s also a big part of the movie. People are running around being cut to death in their dreams><
The dreams are macabre, panicky, creepy, and without escape. It goes down on a kind of psychological level of the people involved, and they are freaking out as well. 

And I guess that’s what makes me like the movie, because sometimes I like a bit of depressive scary macabre shit in my movies. And that is what this movie does best. But still, it could need some extra sprinkles to make it even better, because the dark and distant nightmare-ish stuff is good, but it could use that little extra something to make it truly awesome.
But I still like it^^ I guess you can’t always have it all.

Trailer:


You can find it here:
http://www.yesasia.com/us/akumu-tantei-nightmare-detective-dvd-standard-edition-japan-version/1004782664-0-0-0-en/info.html
http://myac.asia/j-movie-nightmare-detective-2006/


The sequel is also pretty good, so maybe I'll write about that one some other time^^