13 Assassins

"A stirring, unexpectedly moving story of love and blood." (The New York TImes) To save the honor of the shogun and protect the country from great harm, 13 brave samurai embark on an almost impossible mission. Led by the honorable Shinzaemon, they want to assassinate Lord Naritsugu, the shogun's half-brother, before he can take his place on the council. Naritsugu is a sick sadist who tortures, mutilates and kills for pure pleasure and dreams of finally ending the Japanese empire's long period of peace with an amusing war. However, the lord is not only brutal, but also cunning: he is always surrounded by a bodyguard that is as defensive as it is oversized. Shinzaemon devises an ingenious ambush to undermine his opponent's superiority. Nevertheless, the 13 warriors know that they may accomplish the mission, but are highly unlikely to survive ... “Remake of a samurai film from the 1960s, which impresses with a staging that concentrates on the essentials and furious martial arts sequences and tells of the necessity of resistance against the abuse of state power in the guise of a classic genre story.” (Encyclopedia of International Film) With more than 100 (!) works as a director, Takashi Miike (born 1960) stands out from his contemporaries as one of the main representatives of contemporary Japanese cinema, and not just in terms of quantity. No other filmmaker of recent decades has surprised and unsettled his audience in equal measure by moving with such stylistic confidence between two different cinematic platforms: trash and arthouse cinema.