Heart, Beating in the Dark is not the sort of film you expect. Labelled a remake, a sequel and a continuation, the first thing you’d expect it to be is confused, but it is far from that. Director Shunichi Nagasaki weaves these seemingly disparate purposes into a deft and rich fabric with little to no apparent effort. In his original film, an independent production shot in 1982 on Super8, Ringo and Inako are hiding out in an apartment, trying to come to terms with something terrible. In 2005, twenty years later, another young couple are faced with the same tragedy, and Ringo and Inako, twenty years older and with their own tragedy an indelible mark somewhere beneath their surface, finally see a chance at some kind of redemption.
What makes this both the remake and the sequel that it is said to be is the clever way in which the two couples’ stories are brought together. Footage from Nagasaki’s original 1982 film is cut into the new, and as the action of then begins a disturbing parallel to the action now, the new story bleeds into the old until characters are crossing twenty-year divides in order to answer to each other. At the same time, the stark and deliberate differences in the two film stocks creates the idea of a barrier that can never be breached, time that can never be rewound, and the feeling that the efforts of the older Ringo and Inako are somehow futile in the end.
And here is where the film does something else you wouldn’t expect – it doesn’t once show the crime, nor indeed even really focus on it except as the source of the couples’ torment and remorse. There are some truly creepy moments, coded perhaps because of the pervasive influence of Japanese horror on cinematic tension, that never once degrade into tactless exposé. The material, the central issue and the psychological fallout surrounding it are handled with sensitivity and honesty, making this film a powerful study of human motivation, circumstance and reasoning. Nagasaki evokes tension without any of the associated dramatic and, in this context, overly emotionally indulgent scenes; the emotion comes through pure and all the more affecting because the characters are visibly avoiding emotion, as if allowing themselves to fully feel something about what happened might be too much, might break them.
That the film has a note of hope, of realisation that though terrible things happen the human spirit still struggles to move on, is perhaps the most unexpected thing of all. Reportedly the actor who plays Ringo, Takashi Naitou, was instrumental in influencing the way the director approached this sequel and as a result, the issues the older characters are struggling with in the film clearly overlap reality. The real actors struggle to act out their parts, but the issues faced by the characters are issues that effect us all. Had we known better at the time, had the older, more understanding us been there to stop us, might we not have become different people in the end? How much do the mistakes of youth change the adults of today?
Sobering questions to be sure, delivered in an evocative and darkly fascinating way, but Heart, Beating in the Dark is perhaps a little too intellectual, too much a study, to be truly brutalising in its message. This is not a criticism. Bold and brave, shocking and disturbing without being blatant, this is a film that is a once – or perhaps twice – in a lifetime experience; it is willing to say things that others films are not, to face things others shy away from, and though arguably ugly underneath, it never once loses its humanity or meaning.