Retribution (Sakebi, 2006): A detective investigates a series of murders where the perpetrators have no memory of the crime, only to find the evidence pointing back to himself and a forgotten past.
Thoughts
Honestly, the moment I saw his girlfriend wear a red dress, I knew the detective didn’t kill the first victim. His seeing the victim and the woman in red signalled a subdued guilt of possibly killing his long-time girlfriend, Harue, and that she was no longer alive. What I didn’t know was the motive.
Listening to what the third killer (the secretary) said about why she killed her lover/boss, and retracing the second killer (the father), also about what the woman in red said about not being seen and abandoned led me to a conclusion that the motive was ‘erasure’. Just like the secretary said, and just like the detective felt, the murder is an act of “cleaning up” their lives. It is extreme selfism. They kill because the other person became a weight, a noise, or an obligation they no longer wanted to carry. They wanted to “reset” their reality to zero.
My take is probably wrong but at least that’s how it felt. In Pulse, people faded away because they were too tired to connect. In Retribution, people murder because they are too tired to connect.
Does ‘erasing’ your burden works? Well, I guess not really. People need connection, to a certain extent, but sometimes they take for granted people around them and see them as burdens instead. This is just a hypothesis from how the woman in red said “I forgive only you” and how the detective walked away, alone, in seemingly an apocalyptic scene where everyone has died.
The detective was kept alive as the remaining connection and is forced to sink in guilt and regret after realizing how much he needed Harue. Bringing her remains in the bag along with the woman in red perhaps symbolize this and how the erasure destroyed his life instead. And regardless of what Harue said about forgiveness, she still secretly screamed, muted, wanting to be seen as the detective walked away. Maybe. It’s ambiguous.
No, I am not a good poet, but I think I understand Kurosawa because that’s how I always write and end my poetry: existentialism ending with nihilism, or vice versa.