Angel Dust

The so called Monday killer spreads fear in rush-hour Tokyo. Every Monday at exactly 6 p m a young woman is murdered with an injection of poison in one of the packed trains on a circle line in Ya-manote. The female psychiatrist Set-suko Suma who works for the police is called in to assist during the investigation. Her speciality is to enter the mind of the perpetrator using almost parapsychological methods. The police pick up a trail which leads both to the Budd-hist sect ''The Final Truth'' and to Dr Rei Aku's deprogramming clinic, where several of the sect members have been treated against their will with Aku's controversial methods. Setsuko had a relationship with Aku a long time ago and the more she finds out about the case the more she begins to suspect that her former lover is directly involved. Nothing is what it seems in this film which begins as a thriller about a serial killer but soon takes one unexpected turn after the other. As Setsuko gets closer to the solution she is also pushed towards a mental breakdown. Sogo Ishii's view seems to be that we are all borderline cases, and when we are affected from within by a ''sickness'' such as love, we may fall into the abyss. Does such a thing as a free will exist, or are what we believe to be our own in-dependent decisions only the result of one gigantic brainwash? Tokyo as it appears in Angel Dust is quite different from the real and densely populated metropolis. Ishii's vision of Tokyo is desolate and sterile. The main characters' steps echo as they walk through silent corridors and sparsely furnished giant rooms. The people live inside a monstrous machine in the belief that this is the height of civilisation. The high-tech Tokyo is the world's most smoothly running megalopolis and here the inhabitants seem cut off from each other and their feelings, thus becoming mentally unstable. However on the trains in the rush-hour the people of Tokyo are forced to stand close to their fellow-beings. That is when the Monday killer strikes. Ishii's narration is efficient with cool, elegant images accompanied by a stifled and threatening soundtrack. The film's tour de force is an impressive outdoor scene shot in rain with a hidden camera without permission and with thousands of unaware extras, all carrying their own umbrellas, seemingly perfectly co-ordinated. It is worth mentioning that the film was made in 1994, long before the attack with poison gas in Tokyo's underground this year. The uncanny clairvoyant idea to connect the poison attack on a train with an extreme Buddhist sect bears witness to Sogo Ishii's mystical ability to tune into the soul of his country in deep crisis. PES