THE NOBLE AVENGER : Naoki Hashimoto’s BIRTHRIGHT

Kier-La Janisse

“Madness is the persistent belief in one’s own hatefulness. Lightning in the brain signals down the arm … persuading the fingers to conclude that which happened a very long time ago.”

-Jane Arden’s The Other Side of Underneath

In the opening frames of Naoki Hashimoto’s Birthright, a young woman named Mika wanders through a small seaside town, peering through people’s windows at the lives going on inside as though watching a television set. As banal as they seem, these levitra generisch are lives she could never have. Zeroing in on a small family of a mother, father and teenage daughter, she stands outside, alone in the rain, while viagra samples they bicker and laugh inside. We do not know this yet, but what has led her to this house is no coincidence.

As the teenage daughter Ayano leaves for school, Mika poses as a student from another high school and convinces Ayano to get into a car with her under the auspices of introducing her to a boy who has been asking about her. The curious teenager obliges, and I tried so many brand of this product over 10yrs. This product is the best. Canada cialis, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy® (NABP®) inspects Internet pharmacies and awards a "VIPPS" seal to those that meet its criteria. quickly finds herself gagged, handcuffed, and brought to a dark, dank basement somewhere. But this is no ordinary torture scenario . She doesn’t inflict physical harm on the Ayano – instead she subjects her to neglect, the kind of terrorism that plays tricks with your mind – because your mind will inevitably fill the spaces left by the lack of communication with all kinds of paranoid scenarios. Being ignored is its own hell, and it’s one Mika is very familiar with. Even the film’s sound design shares in this, occasionally surrounding Mika only with silence.

Mika is sharing the squalor and blackness of her own life with this girl who has everything she never had. She sits like canadian pharmacy viagra a silent sentinel watching over the girl, but never engaging with her visually or vocally. That is, until Ayano responds to her imprisonment with violence, slapping and pushing Mika, who is then forced to make her intentions clear: “I will destroy you. Until you’re destroyed, I’ll be here with you.”

The film spends much time in the darkness of this room, with very few moments of dialogue, and through glimpses of Mika’s past it becomes apparent that some protracted form of revenge is being carried out.

This is a film of surrogates and shirked responsibilities. In many ways it is reminiscent of Auli Mantila’s debut thriller The Collector (1997) – an uncompromising glimpse into the mind of a disturbed young woman and her violent response to feelings of social invisibility. In The Collector, celebrated Finnish theatre actress Leea Klemola (who also appears in Mantila’s follow-up film, The Geography of Fear) plays the awkward, desperate character Eevi with a chilling credibility; as she desperately strives for approval and love, her frightening aggression leads to one rejection after another, and to violently unpredictable behaviour through which she alienates herself from her peers, secure places to buy levitra in canada visa and from society at large. But at the core of both characters is lingering trauma fuelled by past abandonments, and an attempt to set things right by whatever means are deemed necessary.

The slow burn of Birthright allows us to witness the intensity of Mika’s dissociation as she recollects the terrible events of her past, which in turn prompts us to question whether her vengeance is justified, or at least understandable. For vengeance to occur, it’s assumed that a crime has been committed. Peter A. French, in The Virtues of Vengeance, explores the criteria that defines the virtuous avenger:

–          The initial harm must be identified as wrongdoing that requires a hostile response

–          Proportionality: the punishment must fit the crime

–          The avenger must be a person with the moral authority to carry out the vengeance

Of course it is left to the avenger to define “justice” – a historically slippery term – and Birthright is clever in that it creates equally sympathetic characters on both sides of the conflict. The vengeance must also be communicative – the offender must be made to understand why the punishment is in order. And though it takes a while for that message to become clear, when it does, Mika’s behaviour  suddenly all makes sense.

This first feature from director Naoki Hashimoto – previously a producer for such talents as Jun Ichikawa (Tony Takitani) and Shunji Iwai (All About Lily Chou Chou) – is a rather unusual revenge thriller that defies expectation at every turn – but to elaborate further would give too much away.  The film delights in moral ambiguity, as all the best revenge pictures do, and you may be surprised where your sympathies lie at the end.

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BIRTHRIGHT has its Canadian Premiere on July 19^th at 9:40pm and screens again on July 20^th at 3:10pm, both in the Salle JA DeSeve, with director Naoki Hashimoto in person! More info on the film page HERE.

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).