Name: Mom Says This, Dad Says That
Director: LéaCati Vallier

The yakuza film has spent half a century writing its own obituary. Toei’s chivalry pictures gave way to Kinji Fukasaku’s bloodied chronicles of betrayal; Takeshi Kitano let his gangsters kill time with beach games while they waited to die; Michihito Fujii’s Yakuza and the Family showed the clans strangled by anti-gang ordinances, their men turned into pariahs. Yu Nakamoto’s Break Free picks up exactly where that elegy leaves off, and answers it with a dance step.

The premise is genre arithmetic turned sideways. Kunio, played by Akito Fujii, is the top enforcer of the Mikami clan, an old-fashioned outfit out-hustled by modern rivals, hemmed in by new laws and, in short, broke. When a young woman films him squaring up to an obnoxious passer-by, the rule against touching civilians forces him to improvise: instead of a beating, a menacing, surreal dance. The clip explodes on TikTok. His boss, humiliated at first, then counts the views and sees a revenue stream, and Kunio is enrolled at a school run by a former professional dancer, where he must keep his real job a secret.

What lifts the idea above a sketch is what it says about the genre’s body. The yakuza film was always a choreography: the formal bow, the drawn blade, the ritual of the severed finger. Nakamoto, who also wrote the script, simply makes the subtext literal. His previous feature, The Slit-Mouthed Woman Rises, drew on one of Japan’s most persistent urban legends; here he trades dread for timing. Fantasia, where the film had its North American premiere in the Horizon section, called it one of the funniest films of the year and credited its tightly controlled pacing, singling out Fujii, known to genre audiences from Baby Assassins: 2 Babies, for a comic performance built on a man suppressing his urge to hit people.

Lund Fantastic Film Festival, Sweden’s festival for fantastic cinema, runs from 28 October to 4 November and has chosen Break Free as its closing film. The European premiere screens on 4 November at Kino in Lund. In the announcement, the festival frames it as a funny, energetic clash of yakuza tradition, dance and friendship, about finding a new direction when you least expect it. The film, a 104-minute Japanese production, also competes in the festival’s International Competition.

Festivalgoers walking into the Kino cinema in Lund past a Lund Fantastic Film Festival banner — Photo: Jimmy Seiersen, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The evening opens with Mom Says This, Dad Says That, a short by Lund-based filmmaker LéaCati Vallier, so a local voice gets the first word before the visiting gangster takes the floor.

For a festival built on monsters, ghosts and the uncanny, it is a fitting last image: the genre’s oldest ritual, the threat, rehearsed until it becomes a performance, and perhaps a way out.

Tags: Akito Fujii, Break Free, Fantasia International Film Festival, Lund Fantastic Film Festival, yakuza films, Yu Nakamoto