The most memorable scene in Ryuichi Hiroki's Netflix thriller “Ride or Die” is its most brutal one, in which a whole bedroom gets painted in Dario Argento red after few minutes of rather pink activities. Those we can count are but a few, but when they happen, Hiroki is fast to return where he had started many years ago. Naked skin is famously something that made his career, and once the erotic wheel starts rotating it takes a wee bit of time to put a halt to it. For the audience who can totally live with only three minutes of canoodling/ making love instead of six – these moments are ideal for visiting the restroom or pouring a glass of whatever. For the others, six minutes will be too short because some sexual fantasies never cease to excite specific type of viewers.
Before anyhing else is said about the film, it should be mentioned that “Ride or Die” is Nami Sakkawa's adaptation of Ching Nakamura's popular, but not unproblematic manga series Gunjō. The challenge with Sakkawa's script is to come close to both lead characters, but also to understand the mechanism behind the very crime. The initial excitement about the presentation of an unusually brutal murder committed with passion and calculated precision eight minutes into the film, ebbs away the moment the answer is served – bland as a 3-euro-worth supermarket caviar.
Dialogues feel less chaotic than the build-up of portraits of two lead characters who are more disconnected than connected to each other. We meet Rei (Kiko Mizuhara) right at the beginning, when she embarks upon the road without return. It looks like she's just after casual sex when she buys a drink to a middle-aged man seated at the bar, although it does look strange she would pick up just him – a passive-aggressive type with unpleasant character who readily accepts her offer of having sex in his house because she “gets excited when she has sex in a house tidied up by someone's wife”.
The narrative is non-linear, and it takes a bit of adapting to its structure. Rei's life is presented in an easy to follow sequence which reveals that she is a plastic surgeon, and a lesbian who lives in a seemingly happy union with her partner. But it takes only one phonecall to make her sacrifice everything she has in order to save her big love from the abusive husband.
The caller is Nanae Shinoda (Honami Sato), a voice from Rei's heart-breaking past. When two women reunite after 10 years, Nanae's battered body not only provokes rage in the young doctor, but it also brings all the emotions back with full force. A strange relationship starts developing between the two, always somewhere between friendship and something else.
Set to the catchy tunes of some modern classics like “Lovefool” by The Cardigans, Norah Jones' “Shoot the Moon”, or a cover of Nat King Cole's “Smile”, we get immersed into a (very long) road trip beautifully caught by the lense of Tadashi Kuwabara (Tokyo Vampire Hotel) who previously collaborated with Hiroki on “The Many Faces of Ito”.
The real star of the film is the American-Japanese actress/ model Kiko Mizuhara who takes over the screen by her convincing performance. A special mention goes to the foley artists for breaking the tradition of irritating bilabial lingual ingressive clicks, and to the whole sound & music department for saving the film from potential tiredness caused by its overly long running time (128 minutes).
“Ride or Die” is a curious case of a film that despite of more than enough flows, somehow manages to keep the fire of curiosity burning. That doesn't mean the fire will burn much longer upon viewing it.
