Rating: D
Dir: John Cairns
Star: Rino Higa, Max Mackenzie, Asami Mizukawa, Mai Tsujimoto
Ok, I suppose technically this does contain a schoolgirl. It also has an apocalypse. So I cannot argue with the literal truthiness of the title. However, when those two words are placed next to each other, they have a synergy which creates a certain sense of expectation in my mind. If they do so in yours as well, then I strongly recommend keeping a very long distance from this, because you are likely to be sorely disappointed. I know I was. Here’s the Tubi synopsis: “Armed with her kyudo bow and English textbook, Japanese schoolgirl Sakura roams her village and faces off against zombies and formidable foe Aoi.” Again, this is technically not inaccurate. And yet…
What is interesting is that the film is made in Japan, with a Japanese cast and, effectively, entirely in Japanese – yet the director is American, having been born in New Orleans. That can work, bringing an outsider’s perspective to a culture, as we saw in Bakemono. This, however, doesn’t seem to offer any such insights. It begins reasonably well, with a brooding sense of unease as heroine Sakura (Higa) endures odd behaviour from the men in her circle. For example, a fellow student in her archery class deliberately shoots an arrow inches from her face. Things escalate markedly on her return home, when her father attacks and kills her mother, forcing Sakura to flee from the house, seeking sanctuary at her grandmother’s.
Her efforts to get there are derailed, because it turns out that men have turned on women en masse, something which may be the result of a signal being broadcast over the airwaves. And this is where the movie falls apart entirely, because Cairns has no clue how to get from there to an ending which… is certainly one of the endings I have seen this year. I would have liked to have seen Sakura cut a bloody swathe across the newly misogynistic landscape with her bow and arrows. Instead, we get things like sequences of shitty, grade-school level animation (top) where a character from her English text book, Billy (Mackenzie) comes to life. This, needless to say, is not the apocalypse for which I signed up.
I guess if my expectations has been different, this could perhaps have been less disappointing, and Cairns deserves credit for trying something different, in a genre already crinkling at the edges back in 2011. However, different does not necessarily equate to good. The clear theme of a war between the sexes is never developed at all: indeed, arguably the biggest threat to Sakura is another woman, Aoi (Tsujimoto). But there was just not enough of anything much happening, certainly not sufficient to sustain my interest. It’s notable that it took Cairns thirteen years to make his second feature, Effigy. It currently sits at a 2.9 rating on the IMDb, despite a slew of reviews in the 8-10 range, all from people with little else in their review history. Hmm.