V-Cinema Essentials 3: Stranger

After the relative disappointment of Neo-Chinpira: Zoom goes the Bullet, comes the more sedately titled Stranger, a title that gave away as little as the prior film but for significantly different reasons. Nevertheless, after a day of chaos with boilers and hot water tanks being ripped out, time to relax with Stranger (and for clarity, not with a stranger). 

Bank-employee, Kiriko (Yuko Natori), is busted having been dragged into a scam by a con-artist. Years later she’s driving a cab at night, paying back her debts and is being stalked by a land cruiser that may be driven by a fare that once tried to attack her with a hammer... 

Relaxing and Stranger don’t really go together, as this is not a film that wants you relaxed, it wants you on edge and it’s very effective. I'll be upfront, I liked Stranger a lot; as an exercise in tension, mood, character and style it nailed all four, creating a 90-minute package that punches well above its weight. Though released for home entertainment, director Shunichi Nagasaki’s work feels like it should be on the big screen. It also feels a lot like Spielberg’s Duel and I would be surprised if it was not a direct inspiration. It’s not quite got the purity of Duel but that's because it’s telling a different kind of story, even if both are arguably at heart psychological studies of a person and an exercise in building tension. 

As a way to explore the variety of V-Cinema, Stranger is an inspired pick, as it is a drama as much as it is a thriller, and it has the benefit of really focussing on just the one person in Kiriko and through her aspects of the world she inhabits. This can also go wrong quickly if your lead is some leaden, unengaging numbskull. Kiriko works because she is human and flawed like the rest of us. As we first meet her she’s on the telephone, talking to the con-man who we intuit is just that, as members of her household (siblings, she’s not shown to be married) all start to leave, for work, for school, not realising for a moment the terrible situation that Kiriko is in, and how she’s been sucked in by someone no doubt stringing her along, perhaps in more ways than just for the money. 

Kiriko here cuts a curiously sympathetic figure, even as she’s arrested, because you sense she’s honest (the conversation is about getting the money back to the bank, rather than greed, but he needs more to allow that to happen), she’s trapped, likely feeling guilt and also feeding on the thrill of the illicit. 

As we then move into the night, Kiriko seems to be driving through the world blankly, slightly dead inside, slightly disgusted, perhaps with herself but also perhaps with those she needs to drive. The middle-aged businessmen cavorting with bar hostesses and you’re guessing this isn’t love, at least if it is it’s of the paid for variety. As she picks up fares, drops them off, drives through the empty streets, Nagasaki unerringly sucks you into this inky night world and prickles the skin. As Kiriko drives down roads asking: “is this road wide enough”, her fare responding they don’t know, is toned to cause you to become unsettled, even if nothing happens when you expect something must. 

Once the land cruiser starts to follow her the tension ratchets up but it also gives us an insight into Kiriko’s mind. Is she imagining this vehicle or is it really there? You can see this as a manifestation of her guilt or a genuine threat. Her world, too, provides no particular protection. The man who runs the cab firm mainly just bitches that she doesn’t bring in enough money; the police suggest she should work the day shift as it’s safer, using the time-honoured suggestion that women should change their lives to protect them from men, not that men should change their behaviour - but that’s another matter and too much for Stranger to go into.  

Yet even those men that are vaguely sympathetic seem to want something from her; the colleague always offering her coffee who may not have designs on her but it’s clear from Kiriko’s demeanour she wants to be left alone; another, who wants more explicitly to help her and believes the land cruiser is interfering in her life even if perhaps he has good intentions.  

Not only are the scenes as the land cruiser menaces Kiriko tense but also well-constructed and occasionally surprising. Kiriko, despite wanting to be left alone, is no wallflower. She's not just a damsel running in distress whether behind the wheel of the car or on foot. She’s willing to turn and face the land cruiser, and not just as part of some denouement. She’s active in her life and against that which menaces her. Another story could have had her always on the backfoot up until the final moments where whatever needs to happen does, but no, Kiriko is not that character and the film is all the stronger for it. 

Admittedly, there are aspects of the ending that are perhaps a little unnecessary but never distract to create what could have been a bargain basement version of Spielberg’s Duel. Instead it becomes an unusually compelling and tense thriller held together effortlessly by Yuko Natori as Kiriko, who arguably doesn’t do anything too overt, instead she pulls off a more subtle performance showing the inhabitation of her character, which is coolly sympathetic and feels genuinely like a real person. 

Stranger is a tense gem in the V-Cinema Essentials boxset and if any other film betters it, then I’ll be in for a treat. Stranger demands your attention.