When Ayako (Nagisa Umeno) finds her old high school friend Yukari
(Emiko Matsuoka) working as a lowly traffic warden for a security company,
she pulls all the stops to get her a job in her office - but once in the
office, she pretty much treats her like shit, makes her feel she doesn't
do her work properly and the like ... and still, off work she tries to be
Yukari's best friend, tries to elbow herself into her private life, even
get to know her fiancé Tamura (Ryo Nishihara) ... but there's something
smouldering in Ayako, as she lies to Yukari time and again and doesn't
even try too hard to hide it, meets Tamura behind Yukari's back to reveal
some dirty secrets about Ayako, and ultimately, Ayako feels uncomfortable
with all of this, especially since she and Ayako haven't been that good
friends in high school to begin with (actually she feels she has been
bullied by her back then), and thus she quits - which causes Ayako to
explode first, but when she has calmed down she invites Yukari to a final
talk to the company storeroom, where she even has a camera installed for
her dad (Ken Mitsuishi) to watch. But that talk doesn't go as planned from
the start, when Nagata (Seiji Nozoe), a guy obsessed with Yukari, shows up
uninvited, and when Ayako confronts Yukari with the fact that she has had
an affair with her dad back in the day, has seduced him and thus destroyed
her family, Yukari at first denies everything, and when she by and by
starts to admit to it, it doesn't sound as if she has seduced him, quite
the contrary ... and ultimately, the women's fight gets physical, until
Yukari kills Ayako, pretty much in self defense, with Nagata standing by,
then promising her to get rid of the corpse. Of course, Ayako's dad has
seen it all, and only now does he realize this might all be his fault to
begin with. An interesting yet far from perfect little
thriller, Forma manages to tell its story in a non-linear way and
yet leading to one big finale, told several times from different points of
view, without giving away the outcome until the end. And everything is
brought across by a pretty good cast ... but the film just goes on for too
long, drags out some scenes of little importance endlessly, and while the
rather static camerawork works well in key scenes, it doesn't in the less
essential ones. Still an ok watch, but with room for improvement.
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