A certain man only known as O (Shinya Tsukamoto) kills people with a
suicidal streak via their nightmares, while in real life, the victims'
acts look like really freakish suicides. The police tries to track down O
by offering him a yound detective (Masanobu Ando) as bait, but triggered
by a nightmare, he just slaughters himself in front of anybody else. Young
female cop Keiko (Hitomi) is determined to crack the case, and she troes
to get help from an expert, Kagenuma (Ryuhei Matsuda), a man who can enter
other people's nightmares, but initially, he's reluctant to help. It's
only when Keiko calls O to offer herself as victim-to-be that Kagenuma
agrees to interfere on her behalf ... and in her nightmare he meets O,
studies his techniques - O feeds from the inner fears of his victims -,
turns O's fears against himself and somehow kills him this way. And Keiko,
and everyone else who has nightmares, are safe once more ... Director
Shinya Tsukamoto is always best when he's not forced into any genre format
and lets his crazy stories roam freely - that these films are often
labeled horror is coincidence more than anything else. Nightmare
Detective though is not one of Tsukamoto's wild card-movies, its a
genre film firmly rooted in the horror realm (with a few cop movie motives
thrown in just for good measure), and it's definitely not one of
Tsukamoto's better films. On the contrary, it's just an ok exercise in
genre-filmmaking that could have been handled equally well or even better
by quite a number of genre directors, and that by and large lacks
Tsukamoto's personal touch. That's not to say Nightmare Detective
is an essentially bad film, it's just so annoyingly average, a film that
onme might just as well not have seen, and definitely nothing to write
home about.
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