By I haven’t hated a movie in a very long time. It’s happened (oh it has happened), but it takes a certain special something to bring me over from annoyance or general dislike into sheer, visceral hatred.
The World of Kanako has that special something. It has it in spades. It is a film that cannot really be considered “bad.” But it can absolutely be considered The Worst.
The World of Kanako
Director: Tetsuya Nakashima
Release Date: December 4th, 2015
Country: Japan
The first time someone got raped in The World of Kanako, I knew I wasn’t going to like the movie. I’ve written about rape too many goddamn times, and I’m not going to go into another tirade on the subject. I knew when the first rape happened (one committed by the protagonist, no less) that this was not a movie I was going to like. But I kept watching.
The second time, the film lost me. I didn’t “forgive” the first one, but there’s something kind of magnetic about Kanako. I wanted to forgive it because of that magnetism. But the second rape is more horrific than the first, both visually and contextually. It’s also one that drives the rest of the narrative forward. In that sense, it’s “important” in a way the first rape is not. On some level that makes it “okay.” But on every other level? Nope.
The third time, that dislike turned to hate. I had been waffling on whether or not I “hated” the film for a while leading up to that moment. I was thinking I probably did, but I didn’t feel the passion. Some part of me really wanted to like the film, for reasons I don’t fully understand. But the third rape clinched it. The passion was ignited. “Fuck this movie,” I thought. But I kept watching. So I could write this review. Or, I guess this non-review. Because there’s no score at the end. Only regrets.
I spent a lot of The World of Kanako thinking about other movies and my reactions to those movies. I also thought about other peoples’ reactions to those movies. I thought about Lesson of the Evil, a film which Fangoria’s Michael Gingold found morally abhorrent. He hated it. I kinda liked it. I understood where he was coming from, though. The content is such that it’s an easy movie to hate (in America especially (and now especially especially)). But there was something about Takashi Miike’s style that just won me over. I didn’t like the fact that I kinda liked a movie about massacring school children, but I couldn’t deny just how well-crafted the film was. My technical appreciation overrode my conceptual disgust.
The World of Kanako is also very well made. It’s fascinating, structurally. I think I would need to watch it at least seven times to truly understand what I saw, because the jumping timelines and differing viewpoints and legitimately schizophrenic protagonist all serve to make a film that is a mindfuck at best, possibly completely opaque. It’s pretty, and though the editing is exhausting, I can’t deny its style. There’s a flair to the whole production that I wanted to love, but here the content . It wasn’t just the rape, either, though that certainly factored into it heavily. The characters across the board are terrible, and though that’s kinda the point, it doesn’t mean I have to like it. I don’t have to bring myself down to the film’s level to judge it. I can sit on my high horse and simply toss it aside.
I thought about Hard Romanticker, a film I also hated. I opened that review by comparing it to a much older film called The Cruel Story of Youth . The final line of the intro to that review: “I hated The Cruel Story of Youth.” (I guess things haven’t changed much in the past three and a half years.) But the reason I thought about Hard Romanticker wasn’t because I hated it; it was because other people really liked it. I couldn’t understand why. I still can’t. I think it’s an objectively bad movie about bad characters doing bad things. It’s irredeemable. But people liked it. Maybe they were drawn to its irredeemability. I don’t know.
Likewise, there will be people who like The World of Kanako. Maybe they’ll be drawn into it the way I was with Lesson of the Evil. Maybe they’re the same people who like Hard Romanticker. I don’t know. I guess I can see the allure, but I can’t see how they aren’t repulsed.
I thought about a lot of movies for a lot of reasons, most of them Japanese. This film is very Japanese, for better and for worse. Oftentimes I like that. Sometimes I love it. And sometimes I hate it. Sometimes the cultural divide is too big, and I can’t even be bothered to try to bridge it.
This is one of those times. I could go on… but I don’t see the point. The things it does well (and it does do some things well) don’t matter. It’s almost like The World of Kanako wants to be hated. Mission accomplished.