Pazuru
Director: Eisuke Naitô
Writer: Makoto Suzuki, Eisuke Naitô
Based on: Yûsuke Yamada’s novel
Cast: Kaho, Shûhei Nomura, Kazuya Takahashi, Kokone Sasaki, Ryûzô Tanaka
Part of: /slash Filmfestival
[Review by Maynard Morrissey.]

Plot:
After a suicide attempt by student Azusa (Kaho), Shigeo’s (Shûhei Nomura) school is rattled. But things get even worse, when a group of masked boys take over the school, hold a pregnant teacher hostage and ask the principal and some other teachers to solve a puzzle to free her. But the real mystery is why they thought of these cruel and bloody games.

Puzzle is one of those movies where I really don’t know what it wants from me. It swerves wildly between dead-serious and incredibly ridiculous and the story is just weird.

[SPOILERS]

As it turns out, Puzzle is a rape-revenge film, a generally seriously problematic genre but one where at least the raped woman gets some agency back by killing off her abusers. Well. In this film it is not the survivor Azusa doing the avenging, it’s her (male) classmate Shigeo, who doesn’t really involve her in his plans to avenge her, forcing her (again) to be part of something she may or may not wanted to be a part of.

Or at least I think that what happens. The film also has the irritating habit of jumping through time a lot and in a very messy way, so I can’t really exclude that I might have missed something. Like I missed the explanation why they would attack the pregnant teacher (apparently she took money to keep quiet about the rape) and had to be informed by a friend after the film. [Which doesn’t explain why they would kill the certainly most innocent person involved – her baby. Though we could argue, of course, whether an unborn child, even if in the 8th/9th month of pregnancy, is a person or not.]

Another great way they took revenge was by having the principal rape his own (grand?)daughter. Fantastic. Let’s rape another girl to prove that raping girls is extremely hurtful and an abysmal thing to do. (Maybe we should also talk about the circumstances this rape happens in – the principal is kidnapped and knocked out. When he comes to, he finds a masked, unconscious girl before him and immediately proceeds to rape her, despite being in captivity still. I mean, what? Who the fuck would react that way?)

The idea with solving puzzles or somebody dies, the childish, colorful and happy masks on people who do atrocious things – those were good elements. I just wish they had told a very different story.

Summarizing: No.