Masaki Suda is a remarkably active and popular young Japanese actor with multiple film awards to his credits and for his role in Akira Nagai's “Teiichi: Battle of Supreme High” he again won another Best Actor award at the 41st Japan Academy Film Prize in 2018. The two team up again in “Character” in which Suda plays a struggling manga artist desperately looking a career break.
Good-natured assistant manga illustrator Keigo Yamashiro is very good at drawing but he wants to go independent and get into the big league. Recently, he submitted his best work to a publisher but they refuse to publish it due to his lack of a strong villain character which makes his story less appealing. Disappointed, he decides to give up drawing manga altogether even though his girlfriend Natsumi Kawase (Mitsuki Takahata) fully supports him. Regardless, he still accepts an assignment of looking for a resident that radiates happiness to use in a manga from his boss.
After wandering around town he comes across a charming house with loud music playing, and, while sketching away, a neighbour complains about the noise, which prompts him to go inside and investigate. What he beholds instead is a bloody and gruesome scene of four bodies tied up at a table with their throats cut, and amazingly, he even manages to catch a glimpse of the murderer. Soon the police and two detectives arrive and during the interrogation, Yamashiro keeps his mouth shut about him seeing the killer's face.
Fast forward one year, we learn that Yamashiro has become famous with his own suspense manga series “34” and living in a posh apartment after marrying his girlfriend. Incredibly, he has used the image of the killer to create the ruthless villain character “Dagger” in his highly successful manga. Meanwhile, a new murder case has turned up which involves the killing of a family of four. Furthermore, the murderer seems to be using the manga as a guide to dispatch his victims. Therefore it is no surprise that Yamashiro soon gets a visit from detectives Shido Makamura (Makabe Kota) and Shunsuke Seida (Shun Oguri) who actually reads his manga. As more bodies pile up, it is clear that there is a serial killer who is using his manga as a blueprint for murder.
Since the film is about a manga artist, Nagai dedicates a good portion of the film to the process of manga production. It begins with the basic pencil drawing, next comes the inking, then the applying of stick on screen tones to finish it off and so on. His use of actual bookstore and manga publishing company further adds realism to the visuals. Renown manga artist Sumi Eno, best known for “After God” and “Tabish Kawaran!!” also lends a hand at drawing the horror manga “34” created for the film. Furthermore, the attention to details is highly visible in the designing of Yamashiro's home studios, the killer's lair and especially those gruesome crime scenes.
Protagonist Yamashiro is a pretty laid-back artist as portrayed by Suda, as he seems uncommunicative and mops around with a sullen look all the time but he sure comes to live when he is drawing and his performances are on point overall. Apparently Suda took up manga drawing lessons before filming and it shows. Fukase, the lead vocalist of Japanese pop band Sekai No Owari is quite amazing as Morozumi, the serial killer with pink hair. We don't actually see him doing the killing but it is rather improbable that he can murder a family of four, parents with adolescents and in broad daylight all by himself, otherwise he is fairly creepy and tolerable in his film debut. Interestingly, the character that stands out the most is Shun Oguri who plays detective Shunsuke Seida, whose exchanges with Yamashiro are well thought-out and he keeps the story going emotionally.
Overall, this is a solid production with strong visuals, while the relentless opening credits and the inclusion of manga graphic is definitely a plus. Unfortunately, the backstory of the killer is not dealt with in great details, nonetheless it has a dark and bloody atmosphere as expected with this kind of thriller which should please the genre's fans.
hi, i liked your review and it was chocking discovering that Fukase has a band lol keep the good work :)