Retribution Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The lovely Lena Headey is a favorite with just about everyone here at Cinematical -- click on her tag and you'll see many love letters devoted to her films both past and upcoming. Now she's adding a new credit to her resume, as Headey will be taking the director's chair for her film Kill Drug.

Formerly titled Retribution, it's a project Headey has been attached to for some time ... and when you want to get a movie done, you tackle it yourself. Starring Headey, the formidable Charlotte Rampling, and Jason Flemyng, it centers on an underground group of Longon vigilantes. Headey will star as Sally, a woman recruited into by its founder ... who just happens to be her mother, Sue, who murdered her abusive husband back in the 1970s. However, Sally discovers that all is not as it seems, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely ... and probably that working with your mother is a really bad idea.

"My ambition to direct has been fuelled over the last fifteen years, by working alongside great directors. It has also been my film education," Headey told Empire. "Kill Drug is smart, articulate, compelling, sexy, fun, dark, deeply poignant and not afraid to laugh at itself. Above all it is a gripping and compelling journey, a study of humanity's darkest flaws and purest innocence."

Headey has been slowly making her mark as one kickass chick in films and television -- and it's pretty darn cool that she's going to join the rare, elusive breed of female directors. Hopefully Kill Drug will be the first of many on her resume.

Certain movies get under my skin and refuse to leave. Case in point: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and Pulse (AKA Kairo). There are several startling scenes in those movies that left me on edge for days. Both are horror flicks, but differ in their approaches. Cure is a police procedural with an unsettling string of deaths, while Pulse imagines what happens when there is no more room in the spirit realm for dead people. Kurosawa has a gift for creating indelible imagery married to sometimes head-scratching stories. Even when things don't really add up, as in Bright Future, his films leave a distinct aftertaste.

Kurosawa's Retribution, from 2006, hit Region 1 DVD earlier this week, and it's an odd little beast. In the opening scene, a woman in a red dress is brutally drowned by a mysterious man in a shallow pool of salt water on a reclaimed piece of land near the ocean. Kôji Yakusho (Babel, Shall We Dance?) plays Yoshioka, a weary police detective (similar to the one he played in Cure) investigating the case. Before he can get too far, we witness a respected doctor kill his son, for little apparent reason, by the same method. Is the doctor a serial killer? Why are Yoshioka's fingerprints on the first victim's body? Why does Yoshioka start having nightmares about a woman in a red dress?

Deliberately paced, Retribution veers between an effective freak-out and a disappointing, frustrating mystery, but Kurosawa fans may want to check out its low-key artistic despair.