[yasr_overall_rating]
A psychopathic Japanese executive accidentally triggers a journalist’s ‘dark side’. They begin to connect over the Internet and make a complicated bond.
“Killers” tells the story of two very different men whose worlds intertwine throughout the movie and finally culminate in a deadly showdown. Nomura (Kazuki Kitamura), is a young and charismatic executive based in Tokyo who has a very dark side that nobody knows about. In the recesses of his cold, uninviting residence, he shackles young women and as he proceeds to torture them and eventually kill them, he records everything on several video cameras and then edits the footage together like a movie and posts it on a website for the whole world to see.
Bayu (Oka Antara), is a Jakarta-based journalist whose career is not going very well. One evening he comes across one of Nomura’s videos posted online and his morbid curiosity gradually becomes an obsession as he waits for the next video to be appear. While covering the story of Dharma (Ray Sahetapy), a crooked politician, he tracks down his attorney and in the process, discovers a very young boy, tied up in his bedroom and upon witnessing this, he becomes outraged and sets the attorney on fire and as he watches him burn to death, takes out his phone and starts recording it.
He posts the video online and it’s only a matter of time before Nomura contacts him and the two men begin a very perplexing and complex alliance. Bayu struggles to understand Nomura’s motives and reasoning for killing while trying to comprehend his own rationality and justification for his own actions. The film presents two very complicated people and while the premise is interesting, it never fully explains why they do what they do. When Bayu’s wife is murdered and his daughter is kidnapped, his violent retaliation is understood and expected but Nomura’s behavior is never fully interpreted.
In an earlier scene, he confides in a woman he is about to kill, that he murdered his family and many others too but the story never really gets under his skin. It never tries to find out why he did the things he did, thus, creating the person he is today. Instead, we are meant to just take everything at face value and because he acts crazy, then he must be crazy. The film presents these facts to us but never has to courage to bring them to a successful conclusion. In the end, we are left with a bloody, overly gratuitous movie filled with heartless and unsympathetic people that we just don’t care about and unfortunately, that transcends to the film as well.
On Blu-ray and DVD April 7th
