Sang-il Lee's Villain (Akunin), a film about a young laborer (Satoshi Tsumabuki) on the run from the police for murder, has rightfully been showered with awards, both in Japan and abroad, including Japan Academy awards for Best Actor (Tsumabuki), Best Actress (Eri Fukatsu), Best Supporting Actor (Akira Emoto) and Best Supporting Actress (Kirin Kiki).
Though based on a bestselling novel by Shuichi Yoshida, Villain is a hardly a typical release for distribution giant Toho -- or the mainstream Japanese film industry for that matter. Instead of the usual half-weepy, half-jokey commercial movie little different from the TV drama on which it is based. Villain is an unsentimental, well-crafted, deeply observant film of the sort the better Japanese directors used to make with regularity but is now vanishingly rare.
Lee, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, did something similar with his breakthrough hit Hula Girls (Hura Garu, 2005), based on a true story of a hula troupe in a hardscrabble mining town in the 1960s. Villain, though, is a darker, starker film, if one with similarly humanly complex characters. Crafted from the common, sometimes sordid materials of ordinary lives, they luminously transcend genre categories.
Yuichi (Tsumabuki) works on a building demolition crew and lives with his grandparents, who raised him, in a fishing village on the southern main island of Kyushu. Quiet, intense and lonely, he meets Yoshino (Hikari Mitsushima), a cute, flighty insurance saleswoman, through an online dating service.
When she callously dumps him for a spoiled, wealthy college boy (Masaki Okada), she ends up dead and the boy becomes a suspect. But Yuichi, who tailed the pair as they drove off on in the dark, know what really happened -- and lives in fear of the police finding out.
Not long after he meets Mitsuyo (Eri Fukatsu), another online acquaintance who works as a clerk in a men’s clothing store. Something clicks between them, though by this time Yuichi is wanted for murder. The shy, unworldly Mitsuyo decides to cast her lot with Yuichi and together they begin a new life on the run.
From here , most directors would paint the escaping lovers in romantic shades of rebellion and defiance. Lee opts instead for realism, including the fall-out for the families of not only the fugitive couple, but the victim.
He also refuses to simplistically excuse Yuichi’s crime and glorify his subsequent relationship with Mitsuyo. Yuichi can be considerate, loyal and loving. He is also capable of murder. That contradiction is the mystery Villain explores -- and leaves us to resolve.