Ryo Movies

A troubled woman must confront the madness in others in this offbeat Japanese comedy-drama. Asuka Sakura (Yuki Uchida) is a writer who has enjoyed some success as a magazine reporter, but the stress and long hours of her work has caused her to become dependent on drugs and she's physically and emotionally worn to a frazzle. One day, Asuka awakes to discover she's in a psychiatric hospital after spending two days in a coma; her boyfriend, a television presenter named Tetsuo (Kudo Kankuro), is convinced her accidental overdose was really a suicide attempt, and he's had her committed for observation, even though he's clearly more disturbed than she is. As Asuka struggles to detox and regain her stability, she has to deal with the often-difficult personalities of her fellow patients, ranging from a former porn star with a gift for smuggling forbidden goods into the hospital to a gifted pianist with an eating disorder and a profound fear of open spaces. Kuwaieto rumo ni yokoso (aka Welcome To The Quiet Room was written and directed by Matsuo Suzuki, whose screenplay was based on his own novel. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Following up on his acclaimed debut Moonlight Whispers (about a sadomasochistic relationship between two teens), Akihiko Shiota once again looks at troubled youth. Sachiko (played by Aoi Miyazaki of Eureka fame) is a 13-year-old junior high school student with a complicated family life. Her father left when she was an infant for a young mistress. Her mother (Ryo) -- a secretive and weirdly distanced woman -- works as a hostess and a kept woman for a mysterious gangster type. Sachiko finds some modicum of solace in the arms of her sixth grade teacher, Ogata (Seiichi Tanabe) who has a brief affair with her. As a result, he quits his job and starts working for a nuclear power plant far away. When her mother makes another halfhearted attempt at suicide, Sachiko's shattered emotional life becomes too much to bear and she drops out of school. Though she continues to correspond with Ogata, Sachiko is desperately lonely and alienated, leading to her consorting with other social dropouts. When her sole school friend Natsuko urges her to return to school, Sachiko finds that her long simmering rage against the world becomes difficult to control. This film was screened at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

Shinya Tsukamoto's latest work is a bit of a departure for the director of such over-the-top cult films as Tetsuo: Iron Man (1989). Though punctuated by his trademark kinetic camera work, this moody gothic horror film has the sort of brittle formalism more common in Japanese domestic dramas of the 1940s and 1950s. Dr. Yukio Daitokuji (Masahiro Motoki) is a well-to-do doctor living in a wealthy neighborhood located near a shantytown. He lives in a gorgeous old house along with his father, mother, and beautiful young wife Rin (Ryo). The couple seems happy, but Rin's lack of a past, due to amnesia, is a source of anxiety for the socially conscious doctor. The rigid respectability of the couple's upstanding bourgeois life shatters when a bizarre rag-wearing man kills off Daitokuji's parents in sudden and gruesome manners. The terror gets ratcheted up a notch when the mysterious assailant throws Daitokuji into a deep well on the family grounds and then reveals himself to be physically identical to the young doctor. The stranger assumes Daitokuji's identity by making passionate love with his wife and threatening to kill his patients. Tsukamoto brilliantly juxtaposes the oppressive opulence of the upper class, characterized by deathly silences and Kubrick-like compositions, with the grubby, desperate world of the slums, whose residents could have populated The Road Warrior (1981). While Tsukamoto's fascination with revenge, doppelgangers, and male rage, as seen in Tokyo Fist (1995) and Bullet Ballet (1998), are clearly present in this work, it also showcases the director's growing stylistic maturity. This film was screened at the 1999 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide