Serdar | Genji Press

The doctor always wondered, idly, what was obscured by his wife’s faulty memory. Being an ex-army surgeon, and having seen the worst of the Russo-Japanese war, a trauma of the mind was hard for him to fathom. A scarred face, a scarred body — but not a scarred soul. She’s clearly disturbed, but can’t remember why. And in the rather smothering atmosphere of his house, where he practices medicine with his ailing mother and his sullen adoptive father, there’s little chance of her feeling normal.

This is the premise for Shinya Tsukamoto’s Gemini, which loosely adapts an Edogawa Ranpo short story and turns it into a movie of remarkable power. Tsukamoto is of course the “punk” director of such techno-modern nightmares as Tetsuo the Iron Man, Tokyo Fist and Bullet Ballet. His early productions were done under the collective name of the “Man-Sized Monster Theater,” and his focus has long been on monsters in human form in the modern era. With Gemini, he plunges into the early part of Japan’s 20th century — the dawn of Japan’s modern times — and finds monsters there as well.