The Japanese director returns to Venice with a new film concluding an unofficial trilogy on war and its horrors. While his 2014 and 2023 works were set against the historical backdrop of World War II, Tsukamoto now shifts his focus to Vietnam, casting American actors. In Japanese cinema, the war genre extends well beyond tales of heroic or patriotic exploits, often investigating the trauma and enduring wounds inflicted on those who live through combat. This approach anchored Tsukamoto’s Fires on the Plain (Nobi, 2014) and Shadow of Fire (Hokage, 2023), both zeroing in on the intimate, devastating fallout of armed conflict.
With this new English-language feature – adapted from the autobiographical book by veteran Allen Nelson – the filmmaker takes another step forward. In the late 1960s, Seymour Hersh’s investigative reporting on the Mỹ Lai massacre shook American public opinion by laying bare the brutal reality of the Vietnam War. Tsukamoto chronicles the journey of a veteran shattered by guilt, caught in a self-destructive downward spiral until finding the redemptive support that drives him to confront his actions, make them public, and turn his lived trauma into a testament against war.
Allen Nelson (Rodney Hicks), an African American raised amid poverty and discrimination, enlists in the Marines at eighteen and is sent to Vietnam in 1966, where he learns to kill without hesitation. Returning to the United States with severe post-traumat...
Despite an eccentric, over-the-top, and at times Grand Guignol style, Tsukamoto’s hallucinatory, unsettling cinematic vision remains in a state of perpetual metamorphosis—both his visual trademark and the key to interpreting his oeuvre. Early works, including the 1986 short The Phantom of Regular Size and the 1987 medium-length The Adventure of Denchu-Kozo, already previewed the tropes that erupted in his 1989 feature debut Tetsuo: The Iron Man, awarded Best Film at Rome’s Fantafestival. Flesh, delirium, eroticism, and violence stand as fixtures across the visionary filmmaker’s career, reshaping modern anxieties and neuroses into a sensory whirlwind. Human relationships are likewise defined by friction and pushed to the absolute edge: in 2002’s A Snake of June, liberating sex arrives for an estranged couple only after a harrowing passage through voyeurism, blackmail, and violence. Later films, however, reveal an evolving sensibility through the central role given to female characters, who often prove decisive in steering family dynamics and exhibit an inner resolve distinct from the sheer physicality of his earliest work, yet no less uncompromising. Finally, Tsukamoto’s work as an actor remains notable, performing in his own films as well as for fellow auteurs. Standout screen credits include his collaborations with Takashi Miike on Dead or Alive 2: Birds (2000) and Ichi the Killer (2001), alongside his performance in Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016).
An adrenaline-fueled cyberpunk vortex where flesh and metal fuse into a mutant hybrid.
A clash between twin brothers spiraling into an escalation of dread and horror.
Rediscovering physical desire under torrential, relentless rain.
A medical student searches for his lover’s soul during the dissection of her body.
A journey into the fractured psyche of a mother struggling to care for her infant child.
Can a child’s innocence offer the only glimmer of salvation from the devastation of war?
