Bright Future (2003)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Bright Future, a portrait of three men and a jellyfish, is an oblique, powerfully creepy, and wonderfully weird spell of a movie. Kurosawa (no relation to Akira Kurosawa), a director of odd horror movies like Cure, Pulse, and Charisma, which features an ancient tree as its terrifying centerpiece, creates moods of silent menace, a type of dread in which world weary police detectives and botanists work in alienating atmospheres of impending doom. Bright Future (a title that manages to be both literal and ironic) features similar trepidation, though the horror aspects aren’t as immediately apparent. But Kurosawa’s distinct visual style of cool, urban detachment mingled with bright surrealism marks the film as exceptionally creepy and, at times, startlingly beautiful.

Now back to that jellyfish. The story concerns best friends Mamoru (Tadanobu Asano) and Yuji (Joe Ogadiri), two stoic, dissolute young men who work in a hand towel factory. Though close, Yuji and Mamoru’s conversations aren’t exactly what you’d call garrulous, and the guys spend a good deal of time in the latter’s small apartment, where the curiously mysterious Mamoru tends to his glowing red (and deadly) jellyfish.

Things take a turn when the boys’ older boss (Takashi Sasano) begins hanging out with his underlings. We’re not entirely sure why he’s so taken with the two, though he does reminisce about his youth in the 1970s, borrows CD’s for the youth, and chows down on fast food. He wants the youngness to rub off on him. The guys are intrigued in a rather morbid way, and in an odd mix-up, the man is killed and Mamoru is sent to prison. Without revealing anything, we’ll just say, Mamoru is not denying the crime. Stuck in jail, Mamoru instructs Yuji on tending to his jellyfish something that will become much, much more than pet-sitting. Yuji also befriends Mamoru’s estranged father, Shin-ichiro (Tatsuya Fuji), and starts working for him in his salvage business. They become like father and son while, in the end, granting Mamoru’s dream for the jellyfish. The jellyfish becomes plural and, in one gorgeously shot sequence, a beautiful danger threatening Japan’s livelihood.

Shot with Kurosawa’s dissipated view of modern life (angular, icy, dark) as well as a shimmering kind of horror where the colors of the jellyfish look almost impressionistic and dreamlike, Bright Future is unnerving, metaphoric, and poignant.

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