by Andrea Grunert

The Town of Headcounts (Ninzū no machi, Japan, 2020), Araki Shinji’s (1) directorial debut is a sombre portrait of Japan at an unspecified time in the future. The film is the dystopian tale of a society that manipulates its citizens and tries to eliminate the undesirable such as the poor and the criminals. If space is an important factor in this first film, the focus in Penalty Loop, Araki’s second film, is on time (2). Yui (Yamashita Riō), the girlfriend of the film’s main protagonist Jun (Wakaba Ryūya), has been murdered. The young man is devastated and takes the law into his own hands, killing her murderer, Mizoguchi (Iseya Yūsuke), who works as a maintenance man at the same factory as Jun. When Jun wakes up, the day after having had his revenge, it is still June 6th – the same as the day before – and his victim is still alive. Jun is caught in a spiralling loop of violence during which he kills Mizoguchi again and again.
Araki varies not only the situations in which the killing takes place, but he also shifts from reality to virtual reality. What makes his film original and particularly appealing is its visual design. Jun and Mizoguchi work at a hydroponic plant factory, a highly automatized place and almost devoid of human presence. Jun, clothed from head to toe in a protective suit, is almost unrecognizable as a human figure. The huge room in which vegetables are grown and where his task is to set in motion a conveyor belt with heads of lettuce looks sterile. Just as in his previous film with its futuristic-looking setting, Araki does not need special effects to create an eerie feeling of unfamiliarity. In addition, the motif of the time loop is a perfect pattern to display a great variety of genre conventions borrowed from fantasy, horror, and crime films.
The hydroponic factory is certainly a significant feature of Araki’s film, but the plot focuses on the two main characters, Jun and his antagonist Mizoguchi, depicting not only the conflict between the two men – reminiscent of two duellists – but also the development of the relationship between them and their personalities. Jun commits his first murder in a frenzy. He first spikes Mizoguchi’s coffee, leaving him writhing with severe stomach cramp. When Jun later kills him, Mizoguchi is no longer able to defend himself and Jun stabs his victim brutally several times, venting his fury at the death of his girlfriend.
When Jun kills Mizoguchi the second time, Mizoguchi sees his assailant’s face, and from then on starts adopting strategies to avoid being killed. The following day, he does not drink the poisoned coffee but offers it to a female employee at the factory and watches almost with glee as the woman writhes in pain. To begin with, there is no dialogue between Jun and his opponent, but language soon becomes an indication of rapprochement as human beings. Jun’s desire for revenge moderates and Mizoguchi, realizing that he is going to die, reacts with sadness.
Despite its emphasis on death and violence, Penalty Loop is not lacking in humour, for example when Jun pushes a trolley on which is Mizoguchi’s dead body, wrapped in a plastic bag and kept in an upright position through the aisles of the factory, a group of employees watching in amazement. In another scene, Jun complains to his victim: “I am going to dump your body. You are so heavy”, to which Mizoguchi replies laconically “I am sorry.” However Mizoguchi also complains about being in constant pain as it hurts being so frequently stabbed or shot.
Araki skilfully mixes tragedy and humour, just as he convincingly combines the social and moral levels. The Town of Headcounts is full of references to present-day Japanese society, and in Penalty Loop too the plot is firmly anchored in reality. The film also has a strong psychological dimension. At the beginning it is reported that the police have arrested Yui’s murderer. That does not seem to be enough for Jun and he wants to see the perpetrator dead. The death penalty is still carried out in Japan but mainly for what are considered aggravated murders. However, for Jun, the law does not seem to be enough. He is depicted as someone who gives unbridled rein to his anger and helplessness over Yui’s death. These are certainly feelings that many viewers could share from their own experience – although probably from other less dramatic scenarios. The death penalty is hinted at in the scene in which Jun and Mizoguchi go bowling. In this scene two kinds of opponents are referred to, namely “executioners” and “death row inmates”. However, it is not the death penalty that is the focus of Araki’s film but how to come to terms with the violent death of a loved one and how to deal with one’s grief.
Jun is depicted as an attentive and caring person, revealed in one early sequence in which he sets a ladybird free. But the brutal death of his girlfriend changes him and the gentle Jun becomes an unscrupulous avenger who plans Mizoguchi’s death carefully and does not kill in the heat of the moment. The film only hints at how such a friendly and ordinary man can become a killer. However, the development of Jun’s personality does not end there, and he becomes himself a prisoner of the spiralling loop of violence that he has triggered. The constant killing sobers him up, and a new process of realization sets in, Jun realizing more and more clearly that revenge will change nothing. Nevertheless, he cannot stop killing.
This awakening of a conscience also means that he can for the first time really come to terms with the past, revealed in flashbacks showing him with his girlfriend. In this way, Araki indicates just how much grief is a slow process. Jun’s girlfriend is presented as a mysterious young woman whom he first met when she was burning documents on a beach. Even when Mizoguchi – who reveals that he is a contract killer – talks to Jun about the murder, much about Yui remains in the dark. For Jun, the brutal loss of his girlfriend also means that he does not get any answers – neither about Yui’s behaviour nor about her true feelings. These many unanswered questions torment him as they do many other bereaved.
The character of Mizoguchi does not perhaps have much depth, but is far more than a mere cliché. Araki, who is also the screenwriter of his film, could easily have portrayed Mizoguchi as an embodiment of evil. Instead, he emerges as a broken figure, which is emphasized by Iseya Yūsuke’s performance, as nuanced and imaginative as ever (3). His acting gives the character profile. Intrigued by Jun who is drawing a picture of a mighty tree close to the factory, he finally tries to draw the tree himself. The camera remains on Mizoguchi for a long time while he concentrates deeply on what is for him an unusual task but enjoys this peaceful moment, a smile lighting up his face. The melancholy but also the joy that he experiences suggest that he too is changing. Artistic creativity is set in contrast to violence and death. By portraying Mizoguchi as a human being rather than a cliché, Araki enriches the film’s moral dimension and critically questions revenge.
In addition to ethical reflections, the questioning of the revenge motif and implicitly of the death penalty, i.e. violence sanctioned by the state, Penalty Loop has a strong spiritual dimension, an aspect mentioned by Araki Shinji in the interview I conducted with him (4). Nature plays a major role in the film’s technological world, which is both realistic and at the same time detached from reality. The factory looks futuristic but is real – Penalty Loop was shot in a hydroponic plant in Fukushima Prefecture. In the factory, nature is domesticized and completely under human control. It is presented as a modern landscape and a human interpretation of nature. But there are also plants in Jun’s apartment and frequent shots of the huge tree that the two protagonists draw. While Mizoguchi is drawing his picture, the wind blows through the tree’s foliage, evoking the idea of a ghostly presence. The same suggestion of a spiritual presence is created by the image of an isolated spot in a bamboo grove, recalling similar images from numerous jidai geki. Nature is central to Shintoism, which holds that restless spirits who have been torn from life unnaturally inhabit trees and howl their suffering to the winds (5). Making use of these conventions, Araki succeeds very convincingly in externalizing inner feelings via pure visual imagination.
Flower symbolism is repeatedly evoked by the radio commentator Jun listens to every morning. According to the voice on the radio, the iris, the flower of the day – i.e. June 6th – is a symbol of hope. However, the yellow iris has a negative connotation, being a symbol of revenge, and thus this symbol combines both the film’s revenge motif and its yearning for hope.
There is no image of a yellow iris in the film, but Jun, the avenger, drives a yellow car. Colours are very important in The Town of Headcounts, and in Penalty Loop too, Araki giving a great deal of emphasis to colours. The film’s main colour is green – the rich green of the salads and vegetables in the hydroponic factory and that of the leaves on the huge tree on the factory’s premises, the green of the bamboo grove and of the plants in Jun’s apartment. This lively colour establishes a significant contrast to the theme of murder and violence. There is also the blue of the water in the sequence in which Jun and Mizoguchi are rowing on a lake. Filmed from bird’s eye view, the bluish-turquoise surface of the water creates an almost idyllic image. This brief moment contrasts with the nocturnal images in which water is linked with death – Yui is murdered near a lake; Jun apparently dumps Mizoguchi’s dead body in the same lake. Even the scene with the two men in the boat ends with a death when Jun shoots Mizoguchi dead. Araki’s use of water as a motif in the film is a reminder that this element is in many cultures strongly associated with both life and death and expresses the very idea of rebirth.
Araki privileges image, music and sound over dialogue. Emphasis is put on the actors and how they communicate using their eyes and their facial and body expressions. Very often, Araki is content to offer allusions. In Penalty Loop, the viewer does not know any more than the characters do, but is it necessary always to explain everything? Making clever use of the time loop narrative, Araki has created a film full of unexpected turns. Despite its violent theme, Penalty Loop is highly entertaining, and the spellbinding combination of drama and comedy leaves enough space for deeper reflection on death, loss and grief. Moreover, Araki succeeds marvellously in combining a great variety of narrative and visual elements without destroying the film’s internal coherence.
Notes
(1) Names are written according to Japanese conventions: the family name before the given name.
(2) It should be noted that the time loop motif figures in two other recent Japanese films: Takebayashi Ryō’s Mondays: See You “This” Week! (Mondays: Kono tainurūpu, jōshi ni kidzuka senai to owaranai, 2022) and Yamaguchi Junta’s River: The Timeloop Hotel (Riba; nagarenaide yo, 2023). The first of these films deals with Japanese white-collar workers, a young salaryman being caught in a time loop. In the second, the characters are caught in a two-minute time loop at an inn in the countryside. Penalty Loop is however very different from these two films, the time-loop factor being the only common element.
(3) See Araki Shinji on working with the actors in the interview that I conducted with him during the Nippon Connection Film Festival in Frankfurt on May 30th, 2024.

(4) ibid.

(5) Links between nature and the spiritual world are also features of Buddhism and other religions.