☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
One Cut of the Dead (2017) – S. Ueda
Not what I
expected at all (and therefore so much better).
Described by SBS as “real zombies attack a film crew making a zombie movie”
and it might be that for the first 30 minutes or so – but it isn’t only that or
even really that. I can’t write the
review without explaining what happens after the first 30 minutes so stop here,
if you’d like to be surprised like I was.
That said, the Japanese title (Kamera o tomeru na! or Don’t Stop
Shooting!) pretty much gives things away.
The “real” plot involves a middling director (Takayuki
Hamatsu) hired to film a zombie movie live in one take for a broadcast
event – and the first 30 minutes is exactly that. This “one cut” is indeed pretty thrilling but
also rather odd with strange longueurs and unexpected dialogues, entrances, and
exits. When the characters run, they
really run and the hand-held camera bounces along behind them. Of course, watching this at first, you don’t
really understand the technical challenges required to make the film flow (and
sometimes not flow). Therefore, the subsequent
hour of the film takes you through the making of the film – but the genius here
(from what appears to be an actual film class/collective) is that this “making
of” is also fictional, with the script delightfully “explaining” all the weirdness
in the zombie film that we’ve already seen (and now see again from behind the
scenes, still in “real time” but no longer one cut). Only in the end credits do we get a glimpse
the actual crew making the real one cut zombie film. Given the extreme low budget (made for $25K
but earned $25 million), this reminded me of Kore-Eda’s After Life (1998) where
amateur players recreate dead people’s most cherished memories, also on a
shoestring. And just like that film, One
Cut of the Dead has a lot of heart, endearing yourself to the ragtag crew and in
this case its central family. Well worth
your time, whether you like zombies or not!
The zombies are incidental!
