Ne coupez pas !

Covering the PIFFF (Paris International Fantastic Film Festival) often means discovering real favorites for successful genre films that dare to tackle different themes with a real director's eye. Written and directed by the young director Shin'ichirô Ueda for a budget of twenty-seven thousand dollars in eight days and performed by students from a drama school in Tokyo, Don't cut! is a successful parody of zombie films.

Starting with a single small art house theater taken over by viewers following excellent word of mouth, this film has become a real phenomenon in Japan to the point of being presented in numerous festivals and has earned more than twenty-six million dollars at the Japanese box office in 2018 and will be distributed in France at the cinema (April 26), in the United Kingdom, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Germany and China.

On closer inspection this film is very similar in its approach to the cult film C'est arrivé près de chez nous by Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde in which apprentice directors shoot a documentary about a serial killer. We discover here a team that shoots a zombie movie with little financial means and a very small crew. Unfortunately for them, the filming location in a disinfected factory is close to a place that is actually occupied by real, hungry zombies.

Don't cut! is not only an irresistible comedy but also benefits from a scenario with different levels of reading not only by its will to show how a film is built but also the different difficulties that can occur. To this, we must add that the young director Shin'ichirô Ueda begins his film with a thirty-seven minute sequence shot as risky as impressive creating a real immersion in full horror capturing from the first minutes the spectators and not releasing their attention thereafter.

It's impossible when discovering this film not to remember George A Romero's cult film Night of the Living Dead, shot on a budget of one hundred and fourteen thousand dollars and succeeding in imposing itself not only in the eyes of the critics but also in the eyes of the public as a cult film and the best zombie film of all time. Like that film, Don't Cut! shows that in the absence of a sufficient budget, young directors must show real ingenuity and above all give young actors enough material to play colorful characters. Becoming one of the most profitable films of the Japanese cinema, this film certainly intended for a well-informed public proves to be jubilant and shows that the Asian cinema is always able to bring us real surprises and films as original as effective and especially far from the preformatted Hollywood productions and often empty of meaning.

One Cut of the Dead (Kamera o tomeru na)
A film written and directed by Shin'ichir? Ueda
French distribution : Les Films de Tokyo
Genre : Horror comedy
Running time : 96 minutes
Release dates : 23 June 2018 (Japan), 24 April 2019 (France),
With Takayuki Hamatsu, Mao, Harumi Shuhama, Yuzuki Akiyama, Kazuaki Nagaya, Manabu Hosoi, Hiroshi Ichihara
Shuntar? Yamazaki, Shin'ichir? ?sawa, Yoshiko Takehara

Seen December 4, 2018 at Max Linder

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