ough Tokyo homicide detectives stand in a room with the fresh stiff of a young bachelor. Among them is young cop Manabu Hayase (Eguchi). The apartment is full of the delicious smell of stew cooking on the stove, which makes the cops ... peckish. A lovely flower arrangement sits on the wonderfully set table. A clue? Enter the crime-scene photographers. The stiff is jostled. Something is very, very wrong with the body. Manabu inspects the pot of stew. ...
Hard-boiled Inspector Tobitaka (Harada) arrives with crusty old coroner Dr. Akagi (Emoto) just as the cops finish retching. Manabu, Tobitaka and Akagi surmise the killer has the strength of a gorilla. And is a gourmet cook. And an expert flower arranger. With tiny hands. Other killings follow; media pundits blame the killings on the media. Manabu's on-again, off-again sort-of girlfriend, Asako (Ichikawa), thinks the killer is a woman. Manabu dismisses the idea.
Manabu and Tobitaka find a witness to one of the killings. Maybe the killer was a woman: a college student named Chizuru (Okamoto) who had gone missing three days before the murders started. Chizuru, who has studied gourmet cooking and flower arrangement, picks up three men in a bar; a kid named Kimura (Kashiwabara) is one of them. Chizuru thoughtfully begins to cook a very special meal for them.
In the ensuing chaos, the most basic laws of anatomy are broken. Bodies without brains walk and speak. A powerful, malevolent being is at work. A spirit? A demon? An alien?
Something else?
Something's cookin' in this stew of genres
Another Heaven, as a hybrid of the cop/mystery/supernatural horror and SF genres, may seem familiar to even the most casual moviegoer. The film is thick with elements that seem to have been pinched from The X-Files, The Hidden, Se7en, John Carpenter's The Thing, The Terminator, Time After Time and many, many others. Yet Another Heaven doesn't feel old hat. It mixes so many disparate elements together that it seems fresh, somehow. Everything that Another Heaven steals is pretty good material to begin with, and it steals very well and with a lot of style. Cinematographer Hiroshi Takase does a stunning job of shifting from gritty realism to the sterile, from the spare to the surrealistically beautiful.
A major theme of Another Heaven concerns the watching of violence in modern culture—the observation of malice. Writer/director Iida seems to take the familiarity of his material for granted. Yes, the audience has probably seen this all before. Iida questions why. "Boredom" seems the reason. From there, Iida makes the very wry and subversive point that there's not much difference between observation and participation. The plot turns upon more than one character going from voyeur to participant, for good or ill.
The film is bit too long, but that's forgivable, given all that Iida tackles. Another Heaven has a veritable school of red herrings as to who and what is behind the killings. Despite some very jolly gallows humor, there's ultimately a welcome feeling of melancholy to Another Heaven that makes it, despite its heavily recycled parts, a very special film.
