A Weapon in My Heart

A call girl named Alice stiffs a gang boss for his money but is arrested by police officers Goro and Yoshioka. The gang won’t let this stop them and set an ambush, killing Yoshioka and forcing Alice and Goro to go on the run.

While he was becoming a festival favourite with disturbing dramas such as Helpless and Eureka, Aoyama Shinji also directed this action movie with a sense of glee rarely found in his other work. He strips the genre down to its essence, from the couple on the lam and the film’s archetypal title to the gun fights, martial arts duels and car chases that make up much of the compact running time.

Yet, he was not content to stop there, seeing this rare turn into V-Cinema (his only other straight-to-video film was a high school sex comedy) as an opportunity to experiment. With the genre elements effectively in place, Aoyama finds plenty of room for inventive surreal touches, such as policemen who operate out of an antiques shop and a melancholy hitman who allows his targets to escape. The non-linear storytelling and cinematic references also create intriguing tonal shifts that often seem to come out of entirely different genres, including horror and the Hitchcockian thriller.

– Tom Mes