REVIEWED - CHAOS (KAOSU): Not since Akira Kurosawa's golden years has the work of a Japanese director offered as much material for Hollywood's remake merchants as that currently provided by the suspense specialist Hideo Nakata.
In the pipeline, following the success of Gore Verbinski's The Ring, are English language versions of Ring 2, Dark Water and, from Sexy Beast's Jonathan Glazer, a promising sounding re-imagining of this twisty kidnap drama featuring Robert De Niro and Benicio Del Toro. Considering the extent to which Nakata's work draws on American cinema - Chaos, in particular, has a lot to do with Hitchcock's Vertigo - it seems perfectly appropriate that the director should repay the debt in this fashion.
The picture begins with a businessman discovering that his wife has been kidnapped. A young man phones to tell him to deliver 10 million yen to a drop-off point or the woman will be killed. It would be unfair to reveal any more in such a plot-driven picture, but suffice to say, as the action juts backwards and forwards through time, all that becomes clear is that nothing is certain.
Though Chaos, which dates from 1999, has none of the supernatural plot turns of Dark Water or the Ring pictures, it more than compensates with its oppressive atmosphere and sense of unease. As with Vertigo, the picture creates a world which momentarily seems to allow the fantastic, but which is in fact ordered by the same mundane strictures as our own.
Unlike Hitchcock's film, Chaos is quite explicit in the representation of its characters' taste for fetishistic sex. Will the bondage make it into the American version, I wonder.
