Watching the Detective

A lazy young gumshoe (Oki) is hired to stake out the apartment of an elderly woman. He sets up his video-cam in a room across the road and watches - until he starts to go a little stir-crazy. Then a stranger appears in the apartment opposite, an attractive young woman who sometimes seems to be aware of his furtive gaze... Yagi's debut feature (he was Kitano's assistant on Boiling Point) is the smartest Japanese indie of the year, less a 'who watches the watchmen?' parable than a cunning riff on Berkeley's dictum esse est percipi - to be is to be perceived. The mildly sadistic denouement risks cancelling out some of the more intriguing interpretations, but it remains one of the least boring films ever made about boredom.