Fantastic Fest: 'Golden Slumber'

Golden Slumber: "Once there was a way to get back home."

Yoshiro Nakamura's apocalyptic punk rock Fish Story blew minds and converted non-believers at last year's Fantastic Fest and here the master of the Japanese genre-flick mashup returns with a film that's, if anything, even more impressive than its predecessor.

Taking its cue from JFK conspiracy theories, Hitchcockian man-on-the-lam outings, the criminally overused serial killer subgenre, and late-period Beatles songs, Golden Slumber comes off as another singular achievement in Nakamura's rapidly expanding canon. It's as if the director (working, as he was with Fish Story, from a novel by Kotaro Isaka) had decided to subvert Japanese cinema's pre-existing paradigms by replacing them with Western filmic tropes and then giving the whole thing a serious shake-up. Somewhat surprisingly, it works, and the end result is a deeply subversive and often comic chase picture that carries with it grave political and paranoiac overtones, especially when viewed in light of Japan's deeply conservative and increasingly nationalistic social mindset.

Masata Sakai (Sukiyaki Western Django) is Aoyagi, a rank 'n' file deliveryman and (very) minor celebrity. His fledgling fame comes from the media attention given to his onetime rescue of pop idol Rinka, but these days he's prone to daydreams of his college years and what might have been. When a seemingly chance encounter with a former classmate (Hidetaka Yoshioka) abruptly ends in gunshots, flames, and the death of the Japanese Prime Minister, Aoyagi flees the scene and ends up hunted by the police, a mysterious, black-clad cabal referred to only as "they," and – in an charmingly daft performance by Gaku Hamada – a hooded serial killer.

Golden Slumber is weirdball stuff in all the right ways and Nakamura's vision of a Japan in thrall to shadow politics, a slathering media maw, and anti-random, existential uneasiness hits surprisingly close to home. Wicked cool.

Golden Slumber screens Thursday, Sept. 23 at 3.55pm and Monday, Sept. 27 at 3pm at the Alamo South Lamar 1.