The marriage of Narumi (Masami Nagasawa) and Shinji (Ryuhei Matsuda)
has been in shambles for some time now - but recently, Shinji has changed:
He seems to not know the simplest thing anymore, at times forgets how to
walk or how to get up when he falls, and not only for that, he becomes
very attached to Narumi, even calls her his guide. Somehow, Narumi starts
to like that, too. The thing gets weird though when he asks Narumi's
sister to explain the concept of "family" - and pretty much
sucks the whole conception out of her brain, leaving her more or less a
vegetable. This makes Narumi suspect the changes with Shinji are more than
superficial. Trying to track down the sougce of a virus that's clouded
in conspiracy theories, disillusioned journalist Sakurai (Hiroki Hasegawa)
bumps into two youngsters who just don't natural - even for teens - and
who ask all kinds of weird questions. They also draw conceptions of this
and that out of other people's brains, but they call Sakurai their guide -
and soon Sakurai finds out that they are aliens preparing a large scale
invasion of earth and the extinction of humankind. Of course, it takes
Sakurai a time to even accept that, but ultimately he muses about helping
them, if they just keep him alive, as he's pretty much done with humankind
anyways. The two alien teens though are presently on the lookout for a
third alien agent before they can call their invasion fleet, and the third
agent is of course Shinji ... Before We Vanish is a
pretty unique alien invasion film, inasmuch as it doesn't shy away from
letting the invasion (or rather preparations for it) take second seat
behind heaps of social satire and quite a bit of comedy - but
unfortunately, this doesn't fall together quite as nicely as it ought to,
as the whole thing as a result lacks tension and is thus going on quite a
bit too long to really hold interest. Plus the ending is rather on the
cheesy side. On the plus side, the film's very subtly directed, and the
cast comes across as real. So an interesting watch for sure, but by no
means a masterpiece, and not even one of director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's best
films.
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