“Fast, cheap but average.” is how One Cut of the Dead’s third-rate “director” describes his style to a studio exec when interviewing for the job, but that wet noodle sentiment seems to have foretold a much more sinister prophecy: the fate of Ueda Shin’ichirô’s sophomore slump.
After making back a thousand times its budget upon release, One Cut has continued to find audiences abroad and serves as one of the more recent examples (besides Paranormal Activity) of how creativity can still thrive under financial constraint.
On the other hand, the most relatable part about Special Actors is that the main character, Kazuto’s (Osawa Kazuto), defining trait is a tendency to have anxiety attacks when confronted, specifically by a man, which, same. Besides that however, Ueda’s follow-up to his 2017 festival circuit darling doesn’t come close to the level of originality and pure adrenaline reached in his shoestring budget zombie film about filmmaking.
To Ueda’s credit as the film’s writer, director, and editor: Special Actors is at the least, a well-paced piece of fluff that would do well as some solid Sunday night entertainment after a couple of drinks (okay maybe more than a couple).
The film’s premise is as follows: Kazuto has what is described as an “emotional condition” that causes him to faint at the first sign of confrontation, thus rendering him impotent in almost every audition he has had in his acting career. His estranged actor brother, Hiroki (Kono Hiroki) tries to “cure” this ailment by introducing Kazuto to the Special Actors: a Task Rabbit-like talent agency full of broke amateur actors that take on paying customer’s requests for swindles and other various bamboozles.
After introducing this scheme, the plot refocuses on an Ocean’s Eleven-type team of actors who are hired to infiltrate the Musubiru cult and expose its illegitimacy to their followers and the world, saving a customer’s inn from becoming the cult’s headquarters in the process.
It’s an exciting pitch on paper, but the execution lacks the unpredictable improvisation and spontaneity that’s so vital to genuinely laughing out loud at a comedy. More than that, something bothersome is how the film stigmatizes Kazuto’s anxiety as something to be “cured of,” employing mental illness as a one-dimensional plot device that must end at some point soon, rather than as a complex psychological condition which requires consistent treatment; treatment which varies on a patient-by-patient basis and takes months, sometimes years for any substantial progress to be seen.
Getting back to the film’s formal qualities, in terms of what brought Ueda’s career into the international spotlight, the film is a strict departure. The twists are hardly unexpected, and the layers of authenticity explored in One Cut are nothing but flat jokes here. Not to mention the music is straight out of Garage Band’s library from like, a decade ago.
But, it goes without saying that crafting a light-hearted, low-stakes project such as this must have caused significantly less heart palpitations than trying to nail the 37-minute one-shot that kicks off One Cut.
In the end, it’s fair to cut Ueda some slack leading up to the release of his next film, Popuran, which, from the sounds of it, seems to be much more ambitious in its conception, considering “the idea [was in his] head for the past nine years” and is just now coming to fruition thanks to the success of One Cut.
At its somewhat average peaks, Special Actors finds a few nose-laughs thanks to some of the budding cult’s missteps (i.e. the cult’s leader gets a perm), but those minimal gusts of nostril air don’t make up for what is ultimately Ueda playing it safe, veering away from the type of radical creative experimentation he is more than capable of.
