Synopsis
Police detective Sosuke is shot down while chasing down a suspect. While he is unconscious, his gun is stolen. He recovers, but loses his wife and resigns from the police force. All of a sudden, his lost gun used in a series of crimes.
An Obsession
Director
Writer
Editor
Cinematography
Art Direction
Composer
Releases by Date
Theatrical
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Japan0
25 Apr 1998
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SingaporePG
Releases by Country
Japan
20 Dec 1997
- Theatrical0
Singapore
25 Apr 1998
- TheatricalPG
Popular reviews
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Shinji Ayoama remaking Stray Dog for a Japan whose notions of trauma and paranoid developed in wild different ways from the post war period. It is all very chilly imagined by Ayoama, less a doomed tale but falling under a cickness one can't contain. There's also a certain matter of fact quality to how Ayoama films violence that just reinforces the sense of been lost in a world long gone mad. It would make a great double bill with Kurosawa's Cure (in general Ayoama and Kurosawa go together really well a fact that don't seen to have been written enough).
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Manman. To when it's said that blindness will engulf all. Beware of the shadow in the light, or gain the fate of having your face against the pond, under the post that is futile and far from what we can see. The non-existent meaning and pleasures of what can be seen.
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Hmm... he lost his gun, it leads him to find ways to prove love, and I find this film too bare.
Ranked #5 of 7 on my 1997 list (June 22nd, 2023)
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8.5
Configured with a profusion of formalistic oddities, that obfuscate and obstruct the few moments of objective truth as to render the information back into elusivity and thus functionally useless, Aoyama's esoteric fixation against the machinations of his genre results in a gradual temporal metamorphosis amidst a waning structure. The police procedural destabilizes into post-modernistic affect. The further the truth is searched, the more it expands and complicates its fragile meaning.
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Surprising entertaining for what it is, I thought all of Shinji Aoyama's earlier genre works would be kinda ass but An Obsession is fairly gripping. It operates with the same quirkiness I've come to expect from him and showcases a subversive approach to moments of 'anti'-confrontation and understated violence that would be fresh air for the saturated v-cinema scene. Aoyama is very much still finding his footing, you can tell which shots he's put effort into or thought up a cool idea for, but the stylistic imprint he leaves is certainly his.
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My third go around with Shinji Aoyama.
I don’t know…
I find his films quite interesting. But there’s a big disconnect for me. Something about the style or energy of his films just isn’t working for me. There’s a dry bleakness to them that I don’t particularly like.
You know what doesn’t help? The god awful ArtsMagic DVD’s that look soulless and dead. These films deserve better.
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My limited experience of Aoyama films is they meander between spectacles and art installations, inexplicable events and people saying enigmatic things, and so did this, and that is a pretty good way to tell a crime story. At least one star for the sound design. Enjoyed it a lot.
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或许有种类似新浪潮式黑色电影的体验：就叙事层面而言，寻枪作为主要任务反而在某种意义上被延宕，因为这一过程的紧张感数次被以日常生活对谈代替的长久片段消解，或在时间中，或在空间中。在意义层面，影片主要笔墨也并不在于作为犯罪或悬疑片营造的类型元素，而是类似《筋疲力尽》那种关于爱与生死的关系讨论，仿佛对那个经典命题的再次论证般，体育场上起舞后死去的二人选择了虚无，而寻枪后黯然离去的Saga则代表悲伤。饶有趣味的黑屏则像对跳切或转场等剪辑方式加以心理意义的效果，带来某种断片和震荡的体验。最后将枪指向观众质问观众的选择。
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