The first film that I saw by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no, he’s not related…) was Pulse (almost exactly a year to the day earlier) and I was impressed with the evocative nature of that film and I wanted to see more films by the same director.
Charisma is about a burned out detective who wanders away from a disturbing case in the city and enters a forest that has a tree that is the centre of a struggle. The film is oblique and may not completely add up, but I find it fascinating in how the various ideas and characters link together with unsettling images and many things unspoken. It’s hard to place it in a genre and it kept me thinking about it for days afterwards as I thought about the metaphorical layers and ideas within the film.

What? Pretty movie but pretentious, slow and baffling.