“When my mom died, her bones took forever to burn…”  This line, delivered as petulant complaint by a twelve-year-old, is typical of Canary’s deadly sense of understatement.  Moreover, it’s a strong example of how this movie enthralls even as it works hard to maintain a chilly distance from both its volatile subject matter and its viewers.  Loosely based upon the aftermath of Tokyo’s sarin gas attack of a decade earlier, this 2005 release is finally making a limited stateside run.  For those interested in the best of contemporary film coming out of Japan, I’m putting Canary in the must-see category with no reservations whatsoever.

Yet its appeal is hardly limited to that audience.  Hugely talented writer-director Akihiko Shiota, who more recently helmed the live-action version of Tezuka’s Dororo (2007), has made a film that’s exhilarating in its bleakness and stunning in its formal command.  On the surface, these two films, a contemporary drama and a period action-fantasy, wouldn’t seem to have much in common—unless one considers the problematic (or non-existent) parent-child relationships at the heart of each.  Dororo takes two young characters, one of whom is a practiced thief, and sets them on a grotesque journey through a demon-infested land.  And Canary, well, does the same.  The only real difference is that in this picaresque adventure, the landscape—both physical and emotional—is a little more familiar to us.  Still, the setting is a country where absolute anomie, on the one hand, and nightmarish group-think on the other, together constitute a kind of Scylla and Charybdis between which it’s nigh impossible for any traveler to navigate safely.

Following the quest of a child cult member who escapes from the authorities, the storyline takes this fugitive-on-the-lam structure and slowly defuses the usual tension one would expect from it.  Sure, it would have been easy to create a lurid, tearjerker based upon this material—consider the TV movies we can look forward to about the plight of the kids caught up in the recent raid on the “polygamy compound” in Texas.  But Shiota does something more interesting here:  he uses the outsider status of his protagonist, Koichi Awase, to turn the spotlight on the rest of society.  Indeed, early on an intriguing dynamic between audience and film is established as we’re presented with Koichi’s distrust of the world even as we’re distrustful of him.  To keep this character poised between hero and anti-hero is a tricky proposition but young actor Hoshi Ishida is fully up to the task.  He does a great job of putting up a solid force field, then allowing us to see through chinks in it—although at no point does Shiota have him do this in typical, heavy-handed Hollywood fashion.

Most of Koichi’s characterization, in fact, is conveyed through his responses to fellow misfit, tween hustler Yuki Niina.  Courtesy of a deceptively strong performance by Mitsuki Tanimura, Yuki’s expressiveness plays off Koichi’s withdrawn moralizing in ways that are sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle.  Often Shiota will present their pivotal exchanges in the form of astounding long takes, a device that other directors might reserve for action sequences or for spicing up routine walk-and-talks, but which he uses as opportunities to guide the actors to produce scenes of theater-like power.  But for all its familiarity as a bonding-of-opposites tale, Canary never comes across as anything less than original.  Yes, it’s simultaneously a fish-out-of-water story, a coming-of-age road movie, and an allegory of redemption with a touch of magic realism.  But Shiota takes the best that these modes have to offer dramatically while somehow jettisoning their clichés.  The tradeoff, though, is that the film can definitely be challenging.  The pacing is irregular, the dramatic structure makes few concessions to our expectations, and for at least one long stretch near the end we get a POV character who’s neither Koichi nor Yuki.