CinemaSerf

This starts off a bit like one of those shows that sells the contents of a locker to the highest bidder and let’s the winner make what they can from the contents. “Yoshii” (Masaki Suda) has a bit of an unfulfilling job and lives with his girlfriend “Akiko” (Kotone Furukawa) in a tiny flat where he buys stuff cheap then marks them up and flogs them online. There’s no quality control involved here, he just creatively peddles any old stuff claiming it is what it probably isn’t, relying on anonymity to ensure that he gets away with it. Convinced they can make it big with their very own auction site, he jacks in the work and sets up a lucrative business. With the police becoming suspicious, things start to take a turn for the more menacing and then some of his disgruntled buyers manage to track him down and set about employing some vigilante tactics to, quite literally, exact their vengeful pound of flesh. With only his loyal and adaptable assistant “Miyake” (Omane Okayama) maybe in his corner, things don’t look so hot for our intrepid entrepreneur as his electronic therapy kits make a more malevolent re-appearance in quite a shocking fashion. For a while this is quite a tensely directed drama that illustrates just how unregulated the internet is when it comes to describing and selling things. Is that an indictment of a capitalist society exploiting the unaware or one of a consumer society who expect to pay as little as possible for quality? Maybe both? Unscrupulousness abounds on both sides. However, once we start to enter the revenge phase of the drama, it fades away into a far-fetched version of a video game where the scenarios become increasingly less plausible, interesting and more repetitive. It raises lots of questions about our behaviour towards and dependency on the web, but it doesn’t really know where to go once it has asked them and perhaps it’s that video game analogy that epitomises the ultimate solution auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa selects as he presents us with a cinematic version of sticking your head in a sand of virtual reality. The acting is neither here nor there and though it’s starts quite innovatively it just fizzes out - as does the whole thing. Pity, it had potential.