Noise (2017): getting to the truth of true crime

Sakka is a streaming service whose mission is to provide a global platform for independent Japanese films. This would have been laudable enough back in the DVD era, when a small handful of labels decided which non-Anglophone films would be distributed in the UK. It’s even more vital these days, now streaming giants like Netflix can bring shows like the South Korean Squid Game (or, indeed, the British Adolescence) to a global audience – provided they’re at least co-produced by their American distributors. Which raises the question, are these shows really the product of the countries they’re set in, or are they covertly American media? Previously, a film whose reference points were too squarely aimed at a domestic audience might not get international distribution. The end game for the current model might be for the tech barons to prevent such projects being made at all.

A UK audience coming to Yusaku Matsumoto’s 2017 film Noise might need a little context, so here it is: the event it revolves around, the 2008 Akihabara massacre, is real. Its perpetrator employed a methodology that would go on to be adopted by everyone from ISIS to incels, driving a van into a crowd of shoppers before jumping out and continuing the attack with a knife. The psychological effect on the Japanese public could be compared to British massacres like Dunblane or the July 7th bombings; a sudden, horrified realisation that certain types of crimes can, in fact, happen here. Unlike the perpetrators of those crimes, the Akihabara massacre’s perpetrator survived his attack, though he was later executed (Japan is one of a very small number of democracies that retains the death penalty). This didn’t make his motives any less mysterious, with the killer claiming at one point that he committed the crime in a kind of fugue state and could not remember doing it afterwards.

In place of clarity, Japan’s media was consumed by speculation about what could have caused such a tragedy, an insoluble riddle that Noise attempts to clarify through art. Matsumoto tips his hat near the start, where a relative of one of the victims is contacted by a detective bearing the director’s name. This is Matsumoto’s investigation, and it’s one that is somehow both inconclusive and angrily pointed.

Stylistically, Noise doesn’t feel like an angry film. It drifts through various time frames and levels of fictionalisation with a uniform style that may lead to confusion in some viewers (and, you suspect, this is partly the point). Kentaro Kishi’s cinematography paints in pale, desaturated colours, whose bright light never lifts the grey, depressive palette. Matsumoto’s own editing is relaxed, often allowing whole scenes to play out in a single take, which makes the few dissonant notes (a sharp cut on a slap to the face, a jagged montage of dissociative flashbacks) really erupt from the screen. The score by Japanese recording artist Banvox is phenomenal, up-to-the-minute enough to incorporate key 2010s sub-genres like auto-tuned Soundcloud hip-hop and the woozy comedown dubstep of Burial and James Blake. It’s not something you’ll be accustomed to hearing on a movie soundtrack, and that unfamiliarity is crucial. What Matsumoto is reaching for is a kind of shock of the new, a feeling of unease that comes when you realise you’re adrift in the modern world. You can’t do modern alienation without modern music.

It’s worth pointing out that Noise doesn’t dramatise the Akihabara massacre itself. There is a current consensus on true-crime dramatisations – don’t make the perpetrator the star, focus on the victims – that Matsumoto follows in letter if not in spirit. I have sometimes wondered if these prohibitions are really there to protect the victims, as is supposedly the case, or whether they’re meant to make us feel better about consuming so much of this stuff, so I was perversely happy that Noise is such an uncomfortable movie. The third commandment of modern, responsible true-crime – don’t fictionalise – looks like it’s been elided altogether. In place of the frustrating, half-satisfying, fact-based explanations ventured by journalists and commentators, Noise uses fiction’s increased license to bring in a counterpoint. Akihabara is, we are told, not just the site of a horrific crime but is also the centre of Japan’s idol industry.

Is this true? I deliberately didn’t look it up this time, largely because that didn’t seem to be the point. Matsumoto is not proposing a cause-and-effect here. He’s not saying the Akihabara massacre happened because of J-Pop. But just contrasting the two elements feels like it gets to a deeper truth, painting a portrait of a society obsessed with image and youth to a (traumatically depicted) predatory degree. And this is the core of anger and danger under Noise‘s quietly uneasy surface. Ultimately, it’s aiming to understand rather than just condemn. “Everyone wants to die sometimes”, a character notes, unmotivated, at the start of a scene. “And I think killing somebody is a lot like killing yourself.” You realise he’s talking about the perpetrator. “He had a crossroads, and he chose wrong.”

Is that the truth of the matter? Who knows, but it feels truthful. The idea that art should be concerned with telling universal, human truths rather than verifiable factual truths – to put it in Herzog terms, the ecstatic truth instead of the accountant’s truth – is not as fashionable as it once was. But thanks to companies like Sakka, you don’t have to let your viewing habits be dictated by fashion. You can dig a little deeper, and maybe find something as provocative and intriguing as Noise.

Graham’s Archive – Noise (2017)