Bright Future

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Kiyoshi Kurosawa

2002 / 115min / DCP

Fuji first teamed with Kurosawa on this disquieting slow-burn drama to play the divorced father of one Mamoru (Tadanobu Asano), a 27-year-old employee at a hand towel factory who, along with his co-worker and only friend, Yuji (Joe Odagiri), begins to entertain homicidal thoughts concerning their boss (Takashi Sasano), whose pet poisonous jellyfish Yuji has been entrusted with caring for—and soon develops a strange fascination with. A departure from Kurosawa’s run of much-admired J-horror films, the lean and eerie Bright Future retains the same sense of impending apocalypse and creeping dread as those works, while setting aside familiar genre tropes.