Film

What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases

Cold Fish (2010)

Director: Shion Sono

Time Out rating

Average user rating

1 review

Movie review

From Time Out London

Coming from Shion Sono, the poet-turned-filmmaker who brought us the fetishistic four-hour romance ‘Love Exposure’ and whose films feature suicide gangs and killer hair-extensions, ‘Cold Fish’ initially feels like a leap into the ordinary. But what starts out as an awkward, realist comedy about a fish salesman’s deferential friendship with a rival spirals into familiar territory: rough sex and bloody murder. As a tale of a regular guy forced into extraordinary behaviour, Sono’s key influence is ‘Straw Dogs’, and ‘Cold Fish’ reaches many of the same outdated conclusions, albeit with an ironic distance. It’s always entertaining and some performances are remarkable. But it doesn’t feel like anything new: as he raises the sex ’n’ death stakes to the point of near-unwatchability, it feels like Sono is pandering to a core audience rather than delivering on the story’s initial, unsettling promise.

Author: Tom Huddleston

Time Out London Issue 2120: 7 – 13 April, 2011

Email Tweet Share

User reviews of this film

euki said...

Posted on Nov 01 2010 17:59 Just saw this at the London Film Festival. I found it a dull, boorish movie, it left the impression of having been on the receiving end of a cynical money making exercise, or at best a particularly callow fantasy. I was suprised afterwards to find the director to be mature and have quite a profile. This seemed an attempt to deliver the excesses that east asian cinema has become known for in the west, a taste pandered to as an export market (remember, we're the ones buying this stuff). The plot was delivered with little humour through a mish-mash of misanthropic sterotypes, bloody climax scenes were undermined by the total lack of belief the script inspires in it's characatures. The female cast seemed to have been chosen on the criteria of bra size and were exploited along similar lines. Director, writer etc. Sion Sono offers scant insight into the human condition, not necessarily a problem if entertainment were to be found elsewhere, but it's wasn't. I can only assume he's as cynical toward his audience as toward his people, whom he represents so offensively. A bleak experience.

Report as inappropriate