Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Ploydsge just watch it!

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Robert Joyner The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Anssi Vartiainen Inju - The Geisha Killer, alternatively known as Inju: The Beast in the Shadow, is based on a Japanese novel by Edogawa Rampo. It tells about a French crime author who admires and has based much of his work on the expertise and skill of a Japanese colleague, named Shundei Oe, a known recluse who has never been seen in public. But now our main character is about to travel to Japan and it just might be that he gets a chance to meet his idol.What makes this film work is its cohesion. No single element in it stands out, nothing in it is all that extraordinary. But neither does it have any weak elements in it. It is a proficient mystery thriller done right. The two main actors, Benoît Magimel and Lika Minamoto, are both talented and likable in their roles. The Japanese setting is utilized well enough. The score is nice, the pacing is nice and the twists are genuinely thrilling, though I did see the final twists coming a bit early, but that simply gave me the joy of discovery.Then again, I can sort of see why this film hasn't received all that much praise. It doesn't stand out. It is merely good in an average way, which makes it forgettable. I'm personally a big fan of Japanese culture, which certainly made me more favourable to this film, allowing me to accept it from the start. But, otherwise, I probably would have thought it to be a bit lazy and not that inspired.It's still a good film. Definitely worth seeing if you're into thrillers and especially if you like Japan as a setting as well. Don't expect any miracles, just lay back and enjoy a decent mystery story with an erotic undertone.

Armand if it not becomes boring.a French writer in Japan. in search of a ghost. a meeting. adventures. and a confuse chain of events. the story is beautiful and the cast is nice. but not Benoit Magimel or Lika Minamoto can save the film. it remains a mixture of Hollywood crumbs and Oriental atmosphere. drawing of thriller with few drops of erotic scenes. and the end can impress at first view. like a magic of clown. but it is not really credible and seems be a kind of Pulp Fiction copy. full of good intentions, its ambitions are too great. it is not really a sin. but the game with delicate ingredients for a story with beautiful air but without a real subject is not base for success. only for a sparkle.

jennyhor2004 Enjoyably silly movie about a literature academic and aspiring crime fiction writer whose career, night-time as well as day-time, seems to revolve mostly around a mysterious and reclusive Japanese pulp crime fiction author who may be mentally disturbed and perhaps even psychotic, "Inju ..." poses food for thought about the way films can be constructed and how Westerners view foreign societies and their institutions. Alex Fayard (Benoît Magimel) has just had his first novel published and translated into several languages and it becomes a best-seller around the world, especially in Japan. His Japanese publisher organises a promotional trip so after wrapping up his last lecture for the term with a screening of a film based on a gruesome novel by Shundei Oe, that famous hermit writer, Fayard jets off to Japan for TV and radio interviews and book-signing sessions. While in Japan, among his marketing duties and sight-seeing trips organised by the publisher and his guide Ken Honda, Fayard meets and falls in love with a geisha, Tamao (Lika Minamoto), who seeks his help as she is being pursued by a vengeful and violent ex-boyfriend Ichiro Hirata who may well be the strange and disturbed Shundei Oe.The film starts impressively with a visually striking and melodramatic mise-en scène of the closing scenes of the crime drama Fayard screens for his students and for a while you may wonder whether "Inju ..." will delve into issues like authors' responsibility to readers to show the triumph of good over evil in fictional worlds where society flounders in moral ambiguity, evil is often disguised as good, good people are cut down and evil ones profit, and the universe itself appears not to care either way. At least Fayard hopes to meet his idol and argue that point; the movie appears to travel that way, setting up Fayard as a crusader using Oe's plot constructions and arguments against themselves in his novel, and Oe as a sinister force who may test Fayard's stand and moral mettle with the same weapons, and perhaps leave the Frenchman a changed man of stronger steel. Tamao may be the innocent mystery woman compromised by a past romance and her current relationship with her rich but violent and abusive patron Ryuji Mogi (Ryo Ishibashi). Clues and warnings are left for Fayard to discover and he gets swept up in piecing together a puzzle of Tamao's dangerous liaisons and the mystery of Shundei Oe's identity, nature and what he intends for Tamao, Mogi and Fayard himself.Well the plot doesn't go as expected in a conventional, suspenseful, noirish way and astute viewers will pick up enough clues to crack Oe's identity before all is revealed in the twist ending. Some people might feel a bit cheated by the MacGuffin device that drives what turns out to be a soap opera plot. Admittedly the set-up is ingenious and clever if far-fetched and Fayard turns out to be no more than a puppet manipulated by Oe in a not very complex web. "Inju ..." is more clever and intellectual mystery crime drama of the kind Agatha Christie and her ilk might have written if they were alive today and were aware of psychological horror / slasher and fiction / film noir genres and their elements. Everything that happens to Fayard from the moment he leaves his apartment is a test of his character and intelligence in some way in a tight construction by Oe, and whether he wins or not depends on whether he can recognise the sequence of events happening around him as Oe's next novel with himself as protagonist.The acting isn't anything special and lead actor Magimel looks mostly shell-shocked throughout the film. There are very lovely scenes of modern Japanese life that are reminiscent of the style of Seijun Suzuki's 1960's gangster flick "Kanto Wanderer" and "Inju ..." could be viewed as a travelogue of the exotic in modern Japanese culture with sometimes voyeuristic emphasis on its underbelly (the rich yakuza lifestyle, the use of ropes and knots in sadomasochistic sex) and the mix of native traditions and institutions with Western-style cultural sophistication."Inju ..." could have been a real cat-and-mouse game in which Oe and Fayard try to outwit each other, trying to understand one another's motives and Fayard himself questioning his own morality and original motivation in championing and criticising Oe's body of fiction where evil always trounces good. Instead it's pretty much a standard crime thriller with considerable potential left unrealised that Hollywood could do better if the right hack director (say, Ridley Scott or David Fincerh) were thrown into the hot seat. The opening scenes make "Inju ..." worth at least one viewing.At the very least, the movie can be viewed on one level as an intellectual subversion of Western presumptions about Japanese society, its treatment of women and the institution and of geishas and the roles they play vis-à-vis their male clients, and how one woman uses her supposed victim status and passivity to play two men and their weaknesses against each other.

Phil I'm not sure why this film was made, every character is bland and the actors are either talentless or badly directed, everything is by the numbers; dream sequences, an incredibly obvious twist, no social commentary and no examination of morals or motives. Don't expect anything particularly Japanese or French, this is as bland as anything out of Hollywood, it only inspires confusion and frustration. Like many movies made about writers this is full of awful writing, it should have been two intelligent complex characters matching wits, subtly probing, dropping taunting elusive clues. Instead it is one barely competent adversary foiling a totally moronic protagonist while dropping unambiguous proof and lucking into foiling the one able character who is then perfunctorily killed.