Suspect X (Yôgisha X No Kenshin, Japanese; 2009)
This film is from where the story of Malayalam movie Drishyam and Kamalhasan's Papanasam is said to have got their idea from. Personally, after viewing all three of them, I fail to appreciate the parallelism between the Japanese and the Indian editions. Trying to create perfect alibi and committing the perfect is universal in all good movies anyway. The similarity in the two stops short at the wit involved in how the police and the mathematics teacher try to outdo each other in wrapping up a murder case.
The setting is in an urban setting in a Japanese town. Like all towns where its inhabitants tend to lead unfulfilled mundane lives, so are the 2 main characters in this story.
Ishigami is an unhappy high school teacher who runs a boring routine of walking the same path, viewing the same homeless people with their equally regimented routines, teaching in a school of uninterested students and returning in the cold to an empty house. He is actually a brilliant student who had to give up his ambitions because of family commitments. The only bright spark in his life seem to be buying his packed lunch from a pretty single mother, Yasuko, who runs a small eatery.
Coincidentally, Yasuko is his neighbour but Ishigami never picked up to speak to her.
One day, Yasuko's ill-tempered no-good ex-husband tracks her down and creates a ruckus. A brawl ensues as the man tries to wallop her daughter after she beats him down cold with a glass menagerie. In the commotion and self defence, mother and daughter strangle the perpetrator to death with an electrical cord. Ishigami who appears at the scene afterwards and volunteers to help out.
The next morning, a body of a man with mutilated face and burnt limbs is found in a baseball ground. Police officers investigate with the help of a Physics Professor, Yukawa, who usually helps out in giving his scientific input. Police suspects Yasuko to have killed her ex-husband when the belongings on the body suggested the dead to be her ex-husband. Professor Yukawa takes a keen interest in the case when he discovers that his old school mate, Ishigami, is her neighbour.
Hence, start a cat and mouse game of wits to outwit the police and get scot free with the accidental killing. It ends with a sad ending mixed with unfulfilled desires, one sided love affair and sacrifice. You can be forgiven to think that it is justified to have someone just to cease living if his presence is creating so much of misery to others. Just because we are thought to respect life, the living and the soul that comes with the body, punishing the living for ending the life of someone who is a menacing embarrassment to humankind seems not right. We were told that it is not our place to judge. We are told to be patient for the Divine being has bigger plans and would be judged fairly at a later. And then there is eternity. Well, the PR on the the other-side has to work hard to show their mettle. It seems unfair that some people on earth do things to impunity and literally get away with murder. They say it is their karma. Others say that they would judged in the afterlife. Some drool for revenge...
This film is from where the story of Malayalam movie Drishyam and Kamalhasan's Papanasam is said to have got their idea from. Personally, after viewing all three of them, I fail to appreciate the parallelism between the Japanese and the Indian editions. Trying to create perfect alibi and committing the perfect is universal in all good movies anyway. The similarity in the two stops short at the wit involved in how the police and the mathematics teacher try to outdo each other in wrapping up a murder case.
The setting is in an urban setting in a Japanese town. Like all towns where its inhabitants tend to lead unfulfilled mundane lives, so are the 2 main characters in this story.
Ishigami is an unhappy high school teacher who runs a boring routine of walking the same path, viewing the same homeless people with their equally regimented routines, teaching in a school of uninterested students and returning in the cold to an empty house. He is actually a brilliant student who had to give up his ambitions because of family commitments. The only bright spark in his life seem to be buying his packed lunch from a pretty single mother, Yasuko, who runs a small eatery.
Coincidentally, Yasuko is his neighbour but Ishigami never picked up to speak to her.
One day, Yasuko's ill-tempered no-good ex-husband tracks her down and creates a ruckus. A brawl ensues as the man tries to wallop her daughter after she beats him down cold with a glass menagerie. In the commotion and self defence, mother and daughter strangle the perpetrator to death with an electrical cord. Ishigami who appears at the scene afterwards and volunteers to help out.
The next morning, a body of a man with mutilated face and burnt limbs is found in a baseball ground. Police officers investigate with the help of a Physics Professor, Yukawa, who usually helps out in giving his scientific input. Police suspects Yasuko to have killed her ex-husband when the belongings on the body suggested the dead to be her ex-husband. Professor Yukawa takes a keen interest in the case when he discovers that his old school mate, Ishigami, is her neighbour.
Hence, start a cat and mouse game of wits to outwit the police and get scot free with the accidental killing. It ends with a sad ending mixed with unfulfilled desires, one sided love affair and sacrifice. You can be forgiven to think that it is justified to have someone just to cease living if his presence is creating so much of misery to others. Just because we are thought to respect life, the living and the soul that comes with the body, punishing the living for ending the life of someone who is a menacing embarrassment to humankind seems not right. We were told that it is not our place to judge. We are told to be patient for the Divine being has bigger plans and would be judged fairly at a later. And then there is eternity. Well, the PR on the the other-side has to work hard to show their mettle. It seems unfair that some people on earth do things to impunity and literally get away with murder. They say it is their karma. Others say that they would judged in the afterlife. Some drool for revenge...
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