An Obsession

Celebrated Cannes Award-winning director Shinji Aoyama revisits Kurosawa’s ‘Stray Dog’ in one of his greatest masterpieces, ‘An Obsession’. Like Kurosawa, he weaves his plot around a detective whose stolen gun is used for murder, but from there on in, the two works part company. In Aoyama’s world, obsession is the common condition of man, and for his purposes here, it takes the form of a workaholic detective Saga and a homicidal leukemia patient Shimano. Each is driven down the road to destruction, a path on which Aoyama explores the dark night of the human soul. Along the way, Saga is forced to endure the rewards of his own obsessive dehumanized behavior.