Watch Inju: The Beast in the Shadow For Free

Let's be realistic.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Enjoyably silly movie about a literature academic and aspiring crime fiction writer whose career, night-time as well as day-time, seems to revolve mostly around a mysterious and reclusive Japanese pulp crime fiction author who may be mentally disturbed and perhaps even psychotic, "Inju ..." poses food for thought about the way films can be constructed and how Westerners view foreign societies and their institutions. Alex Fayard (Benoît Magimel) has just had his first novel published and translated into several languages and it becomes a best-seller around the world, especially in Japan. His Japanese publisher organises a promotional trip so after wrapping up his last lecture for the term with a screening of a film based on a gruesome novel by Shundei Oe, that famous hermit writer, Fayard jets off to Japan for TV and radio interviews and book-signing sessions. While in Japan, among his marketing duties and sight-seeing trips organised by the publisher and his guide Ken Honda, Fayard meets and falls in love with a geisha, Tamao (Lika Minamoto), who seeks his help as she is being pursued by a vengeful and violent ex-boyfriend Ichiro Hirata who may well be the strange and disturbed Shundei Oe.The film starts impressively with a visually striking and melodramatic mise-en scène of the closing scenes of the crime drama Fayard screens for his students and for a while you may wonder whether "Inju ..." will delve into issues like authors' responsibility to readers to show the triumph of good over evil in fictional worlds where society flounders in moral ambiguity, evil is often disguised as good, good people are cut down and evil ones profit, and the universe itself appears not to care either way. At least Fayard hopes to meet his idol and argue that point; the movie appears to travel that way, setting up Fayard as a crusader using Oe's plot constructions and arguments against themselves in his novel, and Oe as a sinister force who may test Fayard's stand and moral mettle with the same weapons, and perhaps leave the Frenchman a changed man of stronger steel. Tamao may be the innocent mystery woman compromised by a past romance and her current relationship with her rich but violent and abusive patron Ryuji Mogi (Ryo Ishibashi). Clues and warnings are left for Fayard to discover and he gets swept up in piecing together a puzzle of Tamao's dangerous liaisons and the mystery of Shundei Oe's identity, nature and what he intends for Tamao, Mogi and Fayard himself.Well the plot doesn't go as expected in a conventional, suspenseful, noirish way and astute viewers will pick up enough clues to crack Oe's identity before all is revealed in the twist ending. Some people might feel a bit cheated by the MacGuffin device that drives what turns out to be a soap opera plot. Admittedly the set-up is ingenious and clever if far-fetched and Fayard turns out to be no more than a puppet manipulated by Oe in a not very complex web. "Inju ..." is more clever and intellectual mystery crime drama of the kind Agatha Christie and her ilk might have written if they were alive today and were aware of psychological horror / slasher and fiction / film noir genres and their elements. Everything that happens to Fayard from the moment he leaves his apartment is a test of his character and intelligence in some way in a tight construction by Oe, and whether he wins or not depends on whether he can recognise the sequence of events happening around him as Oe's next novel with himself as protagonist.The acting isn't anything special and lead actor Magimel looks mostly shell-shocked throughout the film. There are very lovely scenes of modern Japanese life that are reminiscent of the style of Seijun Suzuki's 1960's gangster flick "Kanto Wanderer" and "Inju ..." could be viewed as a travelogue of the exotic in modern Japanese culture with sometimes voyeuristic emphasis on its underbelly (the rich yakuza lifestyle, the use of ropes and knots in sadomasochistic sex) and the mix of native traditions and institutions with Western-style cultural sophistication."Inju ..." could have been a real cat-and-mouse game in which Oe and Fayard try to outwit each other, trying to understand one another's motives and Fayard himself questioning his own morality and original motivation in championing and criticising Oe's body of fiction where evil always trounces good. Instead it's pretty much a standard crime thriller with considerable potential left unrealised that Hollywood could do better if the right hack director (say, Ridley Scott or David Fincerh) were thrown into the hot seat. The opening scenes make "Inju ..." worth at least one viewing.At the very least, the movie can be viewed on one level as an intellectual subversion of Western presumptions about Japanese society, its treatment of women and the institution and of geishas and the roles they play vis-à-vis their male clients, and how one woman uses her supposed victim status and passivity to play two men and their weaknesses against each other.

It's not about the story (or the twist therein). It's not about the technical realization of the movie (there is a standard here). But it's about the actors. Not that they are bad actors. But for a movie that has nothing much going for it (you should see where this is going from the get go), you need Actors who can carry this through. Unfortunately there is nothing to remind them by.If you lower your standards, you might enjoy this a little bit. But since the actors and the story don't give you anything to look for in this movie, you could watch better and other movies instead. A french thriller in Japan, that is not successful.

That's the best Barbet Schroeder film I have ever seen. Not ambitious but well made, smoothly and solidly directed. Actors are wonderful, including Magimel and his fellow Japanese partners. It tells the story of a successful french writer who flies to Japan in order to meet, and somewhere provoke, a famous Japanese author. A writer he usually criticizes with ardour. Of course nothing will be easy for him. He will have to face many "vicissitudes". The worst ones...The ending is absolutely unpredictable. I wouldn't have bet a cent on it.A standard but somewhere interesting and unusual feature, especially, I repeat, the ultimate ending.

(brief report from the Toronto International Film festival) Despite the teaser on Internet, "Inju" turns out to be a somewhat mainstream mystery thriller except for maybe a little bit of kinky stuff that ranges from pretty standard to outrageously hilarious. If you have seen enough mystery thrillers, you'll probably guess the final twist before the end, although how soon you get it depends on how much of a veteran of this genre you are.The plot has some elements of interest. Top Japanese thriller writer Shundei Oe who leans heavily on the dark side has steadfastly refused to review his identity, showing on his books only an ominously drawn self-portrait. A keen follower of Oe's work, French newcomer Alex Fayard surpasses his idol with his own work which, when translated into Japanese, breaks Oe's sale record, the first time any author has done it in 10 years. As a promotion gimmick, he is invited to go to Japan to meet Oe, even though the publishers still haven't quite figured out how to find this mysterious author. Then as always, a woman comes into all these, a bewitching and seductive geisha who get entangled with both authors.As mentioned, this is a somewhat mainstream thriller, without playing up the pseudo psychological side – a wise choice, making the movie simple and enjoyable rather than tediously pretentious. Event-driven and clue-seeking under a formulaic structure, the movie takes the audience down a predictable path of mild thrills and occasional laughs (many quite unintentional). The ending twist will not exactly extract a gasp from a seasoned thriller audience. There is no need to rush to the cinemas. A DVD will do nicely.