​FILM REVIEW: ONE CUT OF THE DEAD

​ONE CUT OF THE DEAD (KAMERA O TOMERU NA!) 
​(2017) DIR. SHINICHIRO UEDA, JAPAN, 97 MINS

When you think of great zombie movies, what comes to mind? Dawn of the Dead? Night of the Living Dead? 28 Days Later?

All reasonable picks, but I’d like to add another to that list: Japanese comedy One Cut of the Dead.

Though the genre may give you flashbacks to 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, Shinichiro Ueda gives us something refreshingly different, but still utterly hilarious.

You’d be forgiven for disagreeing with me after seeing the first act. Much of it – lasting around 40 minutes – plays out like your run-of-the-mill apocalypse flick. Zombies have infiltrated (where else?) the set of a zombie film. There’s the dingy warehouse, a cast of stock characters, and more jump scares than you can shake a severed arm at.

The opening section has many bright spots in its own right - Takayuki Hamatsu goes all-in as the perfection-obsessed director, Chinatsu becomes a heroine you can’t help but root for, and all of it is filmed on a camera that’s constantly shaking. However, throughout this first half you can’t help but sense that something is wrong.

For example, the aforementioned camera falls to the ground during one chase sequence. You expect it to be picked up again after a few seconds, but it stays there for half a minute, filming fragments of the scuffle. Why?
These are questions we don’t get the answer to – at least, not in the first half.

I can’t give too much away about One Cut’s brilliant second act without ruining the whole film. In a nutshell, a flashback to one month earlier shows how what we’ve just seen was created.

The film’s structure is deliberately confusing. After seeing the cast as actors-playing-characters for almost a quarter of an hour, they’re now actors-playing-characters-playing-actors.... It was a change that I initially struggled to wrap my head around.

For many, this back-to-front storytelling might be a deal breaker, but I encourage you to stick with it. My five minutes of puzzlement was worth it for what came afterwards.

Act 2 is when One Cut begins to evolve into something more. We see the director Higurashi’s humble beginnings creating karaoke music videos. His teenage daughter Harumi is attempting to follow his path with little success; he recruits her, and his wife Mao, for a TV channel’s ambitious launch alongside many other acquaintances. The pace slows down here, but for an important reason – it gets you to care about these characters as more than just archetypes.

The switch into family drama pays off in the final part. Knowing the story of these people, we see the first film again – but this time, from behind the camera, with all the roadblocks involved. That’s also where the comedy ramps up; details from the second act that seemed irrelevant suddenly become pivotal. TV Tropes calls that a “Brick Joke”, and rarely have they been executed so well.

(Also, for the record – the dropped camera is one of these reframed events. You’ll have to see it to believe it.)

That being said, some aspects of One Cut’s comedy didn’t resonate with me. Yamakoe is the subject of toilet humour at one point; it’s bound to raise laughs from some but seemed out of place compared to the sophisticated jokes that followed. This will, of course, be a matter of taste.

Something else that may also throw people off is the lack of music. It’s largely confined to chase scenes in the first half, and comedic moments in the second. However, this wasn’t a huge distraction for me – the generic action movie soundtrack is just another way in which genre conventions are parodied throughout the film.

Make no mistake, though, this is a comedy that ribs on its subject with love. Nothing captures that feeling more than the climax of the movie, where the crew pulls out all the stops to grab their closing shot.

The scene is equal parts funny and sweet – much like One Cut as a whole. However, it also leaves you appreciating the work of film production crews; fitting, considering One Cut’s road to festival glory.

It was filmed in just eight days, with a cast of unknowns scouted from Tokyo’s Enbu Seminar drama school. It was originally shown on just two screens in Japan – but interest from the European festival circuit led to a re-release. Helped by a tactic of giving free tickets to moviegoers dressed as zombies, the film made more than ten times its 3-million-yen (roughly $27,000/£21,000) budget. It makes perfect sense to compare One Cut of the Dead with the likes of Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, but the latter’s an indie production done good, in a way the other two could never claim to be.

Of course, despite the critical acclaim, One Cut didn’t get off scot-free.  There’s been some controversy in Japan about the story’s similarity to Ghost in the Box, a 2011 play by Ryoichi Wada. Ueda has openly admitted that Wada’s play inspired the structure of his film but denied copying it wholesale. Whatever its origin, worldwide audiences seem to love it regardless.

After such success, it’s only natural Ueda’s trying to follow it. At the time of writing this, he’s begun work on his next film. All we know is that it’s another comedy, with plans to start shooting in the spring – but if One Cut is anything to go by, it should be another masterpiece.
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One Cut of the Dead is not your typical zombie film. It’s got a wacky structure, but this is more than compensated for by the sincerity at its heart. For those who like their undead hordes to be self-aware rather than serious, this is the perfect tonic and earns an 8/10.

ABOUT TIA OWEN 

Tia Owen is a student of English & Creative and Professional Writing, currently in her second year at the University of Derby. Since getting a certificate for a thoroughly derivative superhero story at the age of six, she has been published in several Young Writers anthologies (including 2014’s War of Words) and written articles for the University’s newspaper The Phantom. She also runs her own blog, The Scribbling Student (https://thescribblingstudent.wordpress.com/), chronicling her adventures on the road to publication and giving advice to other writers.  She’s not fussy when it comes to genres, but her current big project is a historical vampire romance tentatively titled Blood Devotion. ​

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