“LIverleaf” Pushes Through the Bleak to Shine. On DVD Now!
The move from Tokyo to a dwindling rural town hasn’t been easy for middle schooler Haruka. Most of her classmates have grown up with each other and formed vicious cliques that bully her relentless during and after school. Mitsuru Abu, a photography enthusiast and Haruka’s classmate is also an outsider but has family ties to the area, is about her only friend and whom she finds attractive. Upon returning home after spending the day together, Haruka finds her family home engulfed in flames, her mother and father dead, and her little sister severely burned over her entire body. The loss of her family, her only emotional support, mentally compromises Haruka’s self-control and sends her spiraling into a revenge fueled murdering spree, targeting her bullying classmates who had a hand in the inferno of her family home. The root of malevolence is not as it appears on the surface, and it will be up to Haruka to kill her way in finding the truth and reveal the secrets.
Adapted from the popular manga series, “Misu Misō,” written by Oshikiri Rensuke, the film version incorporates the indelicate dramas of being a school age teen in while reproducing faithfully the graphic gore, violence, and disturbing nature of character of the series in great detail. Titled “Liverleaf,” as in the resilient, mountainous found three-lobe leafed flower that resembles the human liver and can withstand harsh winter conditions, is helmed by “Let’s Make the Teacher Have a Miscarriage Club” director Eisuke Naitô and penned by Miako Tadano of “The World of Kanako,” another manga-based film adaptation. The 2018 film, which can be described as a revenge-drama with particle elements of horror, is shot in one of the snow-covered foothills of Japan’s mountain regions and is produced by Shigeto Arai (“We Are Little Zombies”) under the production banners of the Nikkatsu Corp. and the L’espace Film Co.
Anna Yamada is in the lead role that’s very familiar and culturally significant to Japanese cinema. A scorn-born femme fatale that’s merciless and personnel, the kind of role that Quentin Tarantino exacted in his tribute to Asian revenge narrative with “Kill Bill,” starring Uma Thurman, hunting down the offending party and dispatching the scum from the Earth in a one-by-one fashion. The “Suicide Forest Village” actress Yamada headlined “Liverleaf” as mid-to-late teen portraying the manga series’ preteen or early teenage girl Haruka Nozaki. She isn’t the only nearly adult woman to play a teen in the throes of hormones, peer pressures, and angsty conditions sideswiped by wickedness and a taste for dominance as the whole student body pretends to be a youthful waste in a snowy, mountainside village on the verge of collapse. Howling Village’s Rinka Ôtani, as Taeko Oguro, stands out with her bright orange hair and a sense of indifferent authority being the supposed head of the gaggle of bullying girls. “Liverleaf” is Ôtani debut picture and Ôtani would eventually reteam with Yamada on “Suicide Forest Village,” but their first dichotomized performance as protagonist and antagonists brings a palpable tension to the screen. Throw a boy both girls stoically can’t admit with a lot of expression and that pressure pot grows into an ugly shape of jealousy spurred love triangle. Mitsuru Aibe is tall, handsome, kind, and a photography buff always looking for the raw and beautiful moment to capture on film. Played by Hiroya Shimizu, “The World of Kanako” and “Sadako” actor instills that hope for the future and a glance of stability amongst the opposing craziness that has ensued between the rebirthed revenger Nozaki and the horrible highschoolers now fearing for their lives because of their responsible part for the monster they’ve created but does he really provide a safer, greener pasture Nozaki needs to return to once her retribution is complete? Kenshin Endô, Masato Endô, Reiko Kataoka, Seina Nakata, Arisa Sakura, Aki Moita, Minoir Terada, Kazuki Ôtomo, and ReRena Ôtsuka are cast in one messed up and depressive high school student body that ends in a blizzard of bloodshed.
One thing about “Liverleaf,” if looking at and considering all the components of the feature as a whole, to take away from the adaptation is how Eisuke Naitô facsimiles the plot points of a manga series or, in more general terms, Naitô” has plucked the rudimentary concepts straight from any regular extreme manga series, not just from Oshikiri Rensuke’s Misu Misō. Yet, “Misu Misō” is very faithfully extracted from the illustrated pages for live action execution down to many of the details with very few changes to the story’s original design. Gore has an extreme graphic nature juxtaposed against the snow, contrasting in homage to those historical revenge genre films set in the same harsh, white blanket, and like all the heroines, or anti-heroines, Haruka Nozaki speaks her soul in her outfit, dressed in a continuously deepening red after each gruesome dispatch of her classmates. This saturation into crimson extends into this belief that Nozaki is bordering being supernatural, like most condemned women done wrong, who somehow find the superhuman strength, endurance, know-how, and resilience in their own disdain for blood and violence to slay beyond their normal means without batting an eyelash. “Liverleaf” is not the chippiest of narratives with a coursing core of grim doom and gloom through a quickly dilapidating little town with an austere school, junk pits, and modest structures that inhabit indifferent teachers, brooding teens, and a mental illness that ranges from inherent sociopathy to social sociopathy of peer pressures and bullying.
SRS Cinema brings manga pen and paper to the big screen with their unrated DVD release of the film adaptation titled “Liverleaf.” The MPEG2 encoded, upscaled 1080p, DVD9 release is presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio. “Liverleaf” stands out unusual from the other SRS releases, a company that prides itself on standard definition 480 and 720 resolutions and compressing features and their special features onto a packed DVD5 that creates eye artefacts on already low budget, commercial grade, inexperienced film. Instead, “Liverleaf” has punchier colors and distinction on that segregates the austere from the vibrancy and the extra space helps allow for this decoding to be as smooth as possible on what some may now consider an antiquated format. Decoding at a higher range of 7-9Mbps, compression imprudence doesn’t show itself here with a clean picture that retians inky voids, charted snow mounds and footprints in a white sheet of snow, and the colors and details on objects that natural enlarge themselves when in contrast, such as Nozaki’s red jacket or the red, orange, and yellow glow of house flames against the night sky. The Japanese LPCM 2.0 stereo renders a clean mix of dialogue, ambience, and soundtrack. Dialogue’s clean, crisp, and clearly upfront of a subdued diegetic sound mixed from the boom mic or from post and a Hisashi Arita soundtrack that scores Japanese revenge in non-traditional Japanese notes. Post mix and action does create some separation that uncouples the visual onomatopoeia of the activity but remains negligible throughout. The burned-in English subtitles synch well and are error-free. Extras include a featurette from Manga to Movie that goes into the history of manga and the adaptation concept which most thought the film couldn’t be adapted, Elijah Thomas supplements with his own thoughts and opinions on “Liverleaf” as well as another featurette titled Liverleaf’s Obsession that looks at the character’s dangerous obsessive qualities, the trailer, a Oshikiri Rensuke, biography The Comically Twisted Mind of Oshikiri Rensuke with narrator voiceover going into the writer’s family history and “Misu Misō” genesis, the trailer, and talent files on Anna Yamada, Eisuke Naito, Hiroya Shimizu, Miako Tadano, and Rinka Otani. These features house behind a static menu, that only has a play option alongside the extras, with a neat art illustration of a murderously ominous Naruka Nozaki. The cover art hints at the film’s stark contrast aesthetics with a Naruka Nozaki wrapped her red coat and jetblack hair sprawled out on the white snow. The Amaray does not come with a reversible cover nor any tangible extras inside. DVD has region A only playback and has a runtime of 114 minutes.
Last Rites: “Liverleaf” is a surprising, better-than-no budget teen revenge thriller that deals with obsession, depression, and a consternation that Haruka’s tragic journey through the pits of a lowly high school hierarchy will only get worse before it gets better.
It's Bloggin Evil! 