Director Sion Sono has long inhabited the battier fringes of Japanese cinema — he is the man behind the four-hour paean to up-skirt photography, Love Exposure. But with his latest picture, Himizu, a manga adaptation set in the aftermath of the Japanese tsunami, Sono’s engaging eccentricity has started to feel a little shrill and forced. A 15-year-old boy is abandoned by his mother and plagued by his violent, drunken father. Convinced he has no chance of a normal life, he tries a spot of vigilante justice, with his sidekick Keiko. It’s a tiresomely hysterical piece of storytelling and a wasted opportunity to capture something of Japan at a devastating moment in its history. Sion Sono, 18 (129min)
Himizu
Tiresomely hysterical storytelling and a wasted opportunity to capture something of a devastated Japan, says Wendy Ide