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EUREKA Send This Review to a Friend
Perhaps writer-director Shinji Aoyama's "Eureka" works as a metaphor of angst or nihilism in contemporary Japan, but at the ungainly length of three hours and forty minutes, it becomes annoyingly pretentious and hardly worth all that time over here.
The film, strikingly shot in black and white by cinematographer Masaki Tamra, holds interest at the outset when a bus is hijacked with lethal results and a profound effect on the driver and two survivors, a schoolgirl and her brother. The driver is sent into a tailspin of depression, while the students retreat into a closed world of their own, with the girl adopting silence as a reaction. The problem is compounded when their mother abandons them and they are left to their devices.
Through a series of plot developments the driver moves into their house, as does a cousin, and the foursome begin a life together, eventually going off on a bus converted into a mobile home. But something else is going on. Women are being killed mysteriously, apparently by a serial murderer. Who is it?
It takes forever following the principals around, and while some of what occurs is arresting and various scenes are atmospheric, the film is top heavy beyond anything revealed, and the characters themselves are not all that interesting. It is a story that could have been told in less than half the time, and it might have been too long at that. A Shooting Gallery release as part of its ongoing series with Loews Cineplex Entertainment.
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