Vacation (Hajime Kadoi, 2008): Japan

Reviewed by Charles Hedrick. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

The Japanese film Vacation (also called Kyuka) is a morbidly depressing film about the death penalty in Japan. While this film is extremely depressing, it still delivers powerful messages about the importance of life and how it should be respected, and how some things, no matter how unfortunate, have to be done. This film uses grim acting, grim settings, and many still shots to show off the depressing setting that death row prisoners share with their guards.

The main plot of Vacation centers around a Shinichi Kaneda (Hidetoshi Nishijima) who is a prisoner on death row, and his guard Toru Hirai (Kaoru Kobayashi). The story switches back and forth between the daily life of  Kaneda, and the efforts of  Hirai to get to know his bride to be Mika (Nene Otsuka), and become a father to her untrusting son Tatsuya (Shusei Uto). Throughout the course of the movie all of the death row prison guards get to know Shinichi Kaneda and come to become attached to him. However later in the movie Kaneda’s execution date is declared and Hirai decides that this is his chance to earn a leave of absence that he can spend getting to know his new family. So Hirai volunteers to be the “support”, this is the person who grabs the body as it is being hung to prevent it from twitching.

An aspect of this movie that made it so powerful was the way the camera would sometimes not move and the audience would just have to sit and watch a single shot for a long time. An example of this would be every scene involving Kaneda’s cell, because the camera would not move for long periods of time during these scenes the audience would be forced to take in every sad aspect of being a death row prisoner in Japan. While this type of depressing atmosphere made this movie powerful it was also a slight annoyance that should have been toned down a little bit. The reason for this is because that was all this movie was, it was just too depressing and was not enjoyable to watch at times.

One other aspect that made this film powerful was the way cinematographer (Yukihiro Okimura) used bleak colors and bleak lighting to enhance the grim atmosphere of the prison. For instance when Kaneda was allowed to go outside and get some exercise, it turned out that even outside Kaneda was in a cell, because he was confined, even outside, to a small colorless space with only a view through a chain link fence to the outside world. The reason that this scene is so powerful is because when the audience saw Kaneda’s walk out into this place they let let out a sad sigh, proving that this scene had the desired effect.

Vacation is hands down the most depressing film I have seen all this year and for all of 2008 making it a failure as a film designed to entertain, but a huge success as a film about death row. I would not suggest this film to anyone that wants to have a good time at the movies, however if you are looking for a movie that delivers a powerful message about death row, or don’t mind being depressed for the next few days then I highly recommend this movie.