The Beast to Die

Radiance’s recent release of The Beast to Die is a re-teaming of The Game Trilogy director, Toru Murakawa and star Yusaku Matsuda. Some may recall I was ambivalent about the first two films in that set and more effusive about the third. Arguably, as this 1980 thriller was made after those, it bodes well for its first viewing by this particular reviewer. 

Photo-journalist Date (Yusaku Matsuda) plans a methodical bank heist, enlisting an angry waiter-cum-bar-owner, Sanada (Takeshi Kaga) to help him. However, Date is not driven by the money, but the demons that haunt him after what he has witnessed on battlefields across the world. 

It’s almost a disservice to call The Beast to Die a thriller, the resultant film is something very different than such a moniker would suggest. It takes a while to get a handle on the character and what is going on. Early in the story, killing first a policeman for his gun, then robbing a yakuza’s illegal gambling den, he kills with a blank, confused almost animal (but not animalistic) action. Suddenly, he’s cool, calm, almost brutally calculated in how he plans aspects of the bank heist. Cut to his delight in listening to a performance of music, even if his emotions are suppressed.  

Date is a conundrum. He seems to be many things but who is the real person? Is it the one that casually murders or loves classical music, which at first may seem like an attempt to perhaps narratively humanise him - as is his quoting of poetry - but this would be a simplification. It takes a while, a significant while, for Date to really unfold before us, and for the longest time for all the various aspects of him to conflict and collide until who and what he is can be determined. Does Date even exist any more? 

One very clear aspect is his apparent lack of value for human life. Yet this is not portrayed as gleeful murder and this is what arguably makes it all the more fascinating. As he brings Sanada into his plot, Sanada is living with a woman who is seeing other men, one of which is an American officer. Sanada seems to love and hate her, both want to kill her and you suspect want to love her. Sanada's personality is almost drawn into Date’s own, into his more and more deranged mindset and is convinced to kill her. It seems bizarre on one level, Date’s almost single-minded desire for this because there is no love or hate behind it but something very different. For the longest time this seems to be because Date is dead inside; it's commented often how his eyes seem to lack any spark of life. It’s true, and Matsuda certainly plays it this way, slightly stooped, apparently without much passion except the moving of his fingers, tapping in time to his beloved music, his face almost as immobile as his body. Again, it all seems to mix into questions of who or what is he?  

The film really does pivot on his character, and Matsuda’s performance. A detective played by Hideo Murota has a seemingly supernatural ability to both suspect and find Date, and this is not unimportant but the policeman’s suspicions of him is not the main cut and thrust of the film. The Beast to Die digs into Date, deeper and deeper as the narrative plays out and all those aspects of his character start to make sense, even if the why and the impact of it are arguably horrific. 

I did wonder if Seijun Suzuki had seen Matsuda in The Beast to Die because there's something about him in this film that is similar to Suzuki’s use of him in Kagero-za. There’s also something in the directing of the film that is entirely unexpected in a thriller, how the director Murakawa often allows scenes to unfold as a tableau, whether Sanada’s girlfriend dancing flamenco as Sanada is tormented by love and hate, or afterwards, as Date speaks about what the impact of the prior scene means to Sanada, how it has changed him and what he says may not be what you expect.  

It’s the last quarter of the story where the strands of the film come together, and though aspects of the thriller remain it drills down more clearly into character, into Date, and how you realise all his actions amount to one thing: to reenact, to reinstate, to renew the feelings of the battlefield; it’s so suffused to his being that he cannot seem to escape it. Even Reiko (Asami Kobayashi), who shares his love of classical music, cannot touch the surface of the damage done. It’s too deep.  

The film is beautifully shot by Seizo Sengen, often because of how the image complements perfectly what we have unfolding with Matsuda’s character before us, and Matsuda’s subsequent move into more overtly dramatic work after this film seems no surprise, because he is able to effortlessly flit between the various aspects of his character while remaining a single, unified, if damaged person. It's the kind of role and performance where missteps could be catastrophic to the mood of the film because he is the character that all things hinge upon. The audience should want to find a way to sympathise with this man, if we can, because often his violence is callous, his apparent disdain for life is appalling, but there’s something in Matsuda’s performance and the tone of the film that tells us this is not because of an inherent brutality but something else.

Murota as the detective brings a quiet heft to his role and a curious lightness at times that plays as a nice balance to Matsuda. What perhaps though is telling is that Takeshi Kaga as Sanada looks a little like Matsuda, or rather Matsuda in The Game Trilogy, even sporting a perm similar to the one Matsuda had in those films and shares his tan; the casting and his appearance, you feel is a suggestion of just how Date is manipulating the character of Sanada, creating a double of himself.  

The Beast to Die is arguably a film you have to see to fully appreciate, True, you could say that of almost any film, but this motion picture inhabits that unique space between genres and classifications such that it tends towards being in none or all of them.  

If I had a gripe with the film I’d argue it has two endings, and the second one is perhaps unnecessary. The first left us in a place that felt right, whereas the second one seemed a bit forced, a coda that didn’t add anything other than running-time, but that aside A Beast to Die is strange, untameable creature that demands a viewing, and perhaps more than one.