Miike: Jūsannin no Shikaku (13 Assassins) (2010)

A samurai theodicy wrapped in a genre tribute, 13 Assassins considers a samurai’s duty to his master against his duty to his people. Loosely based on the 1963 film of the same name, it follows a group of samurai, led by world-weary Shizaemon (Koji Yakusho), who decide to ambush and kill Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki), the sadistic half-brother of the Shogun, in vengeance for his litany of crimes against the peasants. We’re shown some of these crimes in the opening scenes, and they immediately exceed everything that comes after them, everything that might be imagined - Miike is brilliant at crafting images whose horror defies any commensurate action or response - which is perfect for a revenge film, since revenge only becomes insatiable once it becomes impossible. Even more horrifically, perhaps, Naritsugu positively welcomes the spectacle of his own death, co-opting every vengeful  impulse as an exquisitely staged entertainment for his benefit, a simulacrum of a Golden Age of War that he never got to see firsthand. And, as the film progresses, that starts to blur him with the samurai - doomed to the very end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, soldiers on both sides tremble with the pent-up energies of a extended era of peace, choking on their need for a noble death, aching to cross the murky threshold that Miike evoked so beautifully in Hara-Kiri. That makes for a labyrinthine fecundity of conspiracy and disquiet, an entropic decay and dissolution of Edo architecture, as Miike renews the galactic slow-motion moonscapes of Kurosawa, cascading waterfalls of space that can only be witnessed in geological time. In fact, it often feels more indebted to Kurosawa than to the original film, or at least clarifies just how indebted the original film was to Kurosawa, and to The Seven Samurai in particular. Except that Miike’s siege-spirals are even more vertiginously vortical than Kurosawa’s, if that were possible – this siege and ambush is about trapping criminals inside the state, rather than keeping them out of it – as if he were trying, desperately, to centrifuge action from spectacle, to escape his own film.