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Chaos

2000, Movie, NR, 90 mins

Chaos: Review

CHAOS | KAOSU
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With his sure handling of this thriller's switchback plot and hairpin turns, Hideo Nakata confirms his mastery of genre material in the wake of his phenomenally successful RING — the 1998 Japanese horror movie on which the smash Hollywood remake was based — and its sequel, RING 2 (1998). Komiyama Takayuki (Ken Mitsuishi), the CEO of Shinko Enterprises, and his beautiful young wife, Saori (Miki Nakatani), are having lunch at Tokyo's fashionable L restaurant. Komiyama leaves to pay the bill, and when he turns around, Saori is gone. Baffled by her sudden disappearance but late for a meeting, Komiyama returns to his office, only to have his worst fears confirmed by an anonymous phone call. A voice, claiming to belong to a Mr. Sato, informs Komiyama that his wife's been kidnapped, and if he doesn't cough up 30 million yen by the following afternoon, Saori will die. The voice advises Komiyama to wait by the phone for further instructions, and under no circumstances should he notify the police. Komiyama, however, calls Detective Hamaguchi (Jun Kunimura) and by noon the next day a team of officers is gathered around Komiyama's tapped phone, waiting the kidnapper's call. Meanwhile, in another part of Tokyo, "Mr. Sato" (Masato Hagiwara) calls Komiyama's sister and explains that if she doesn't gather together all the cash in the house and immediately take it to a nearby train station, he'll not only kill her sister-in-law, but her son as well. As Komiyama heads for the drop-off point with an undercover officer in the driver's seat, his terrified sister heads for the train station with a bag filled with cash. That's the set-up, but there's more — a lot more. To reveal anything else would mean saying too much, since half the fun lies in the devious ways this ingeniously constructed plot unfolds. Film buffs who recognize the opening shot will have a head start, but even they will be pretty hard pressed to guess exactly where everything's headed. With a few solid shocks and a bit of kinky sex, Nakata keeps the film's feet firmly grounded in the pulpy conventions of the erotic thriller without ever condescending to his audience or the material. He smoothly inserts flashbacks into the action and trusts his viewers to keep up as this twisty — and twisted — plot unfolds in a world in which one bad deed deserves another and nothing is exactly as it seems. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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