9 Souls

Director: Toshiaki Toyoda
Year: 2003
Runtime: 1h 59min
Format: .avi
Lagnguage/Subtitles: Japanese with soft English subtitles

It has been a while since I posted a full feature movie. Actually it has been relatively long since I posted anything but that's not the point. Two sentences in and I'm already derailing, how nice. And now I'm talking to myself by typing. What the hell brain.

9 Souls is a story about nine prisoners that somehow managed to run away from prison. At first it might be a little overwhelming to follow nine characters but as the story progresses you really get to know them and dislike/like them so it's only momentarily that you'll be lost in this endless barrage of characters. They are all convicts for different reasons but they all manage to stick together by this loose idea that there might be some money hidden somewhere and so they hijack a convenient truck and go on a adventure.

The magic of this movie is that it starts as your usual (but a bit unusual) prison break movie which is followed by a pursuit and so on, you know the cliche. Actually this setting is only the building block for the rest of the movie that has much more to offer. The center of this movie are the prisoners and their lives and what they want to do with it. At moments it's a cheery road trip sodomy and a little later it's a sad story about a doomed restaurant worker. Many stories intervened and held by the common goal of getting away from your troubles. They all try to miserably fit back into society but they ultimately can't because the society itself has written them off long ago. They're trash now, most of them anyway.

Overall this is one of the best movies that I watched this year so far therefore I can't really give it any real subjective analysis but I can direct you to a much better review that might shed some more light on this film if my description is (as usually) vague. Just follow it here.

Links:

One, two, three, four, five and six.