Canary

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Movie: Canary
Romaji: Kanaria
Japanese: カナリア
Director: Akihiko Shiota
Writer: Akihiko Shiota
Producer:
Cinematography: Yutaka Yamazaki
Release Date: March 12, 2005
Runtime: 132 min
Language: Japanese
Country: Japan

Plot

Though the cult here is named Nirvana, Shiota's look at the plight of children raised in the compound of a religious cult, later disbanded after a murderous gas attack on the Tokyo subway, was clearly inspired by the real-life killings of Aum Shinrikyo. It also covers similar territory to his earlier Harmful Insect (2001), focusing on the lives of children cast adrift in a world where the guidance of adults counts for little.

After being removed from the clutches of the Nirvana cult where he has been kept secluded from normal society, 12-year-old Koichi (Ishida) is placed into the hands of child welfare by the authorities. Rebellious, angry, and defiant, he is refused a home by his maternal grandfather, who recognises in him similar character traits to that of his own estranged daughter and cult member Michiko (Koda). The grandfather does take in his younger sister Asako however, leaving Koichi all alone in custody.

His father long dead, Koichi breaks out of care and sets off to reclaim his sister, with the somewhat impractical goal of taking her away to live together and return to a distant utopian past when the family unit was still intact. On the run, he meets with the similarly-aged Yuki (Tanimura), a young girl from a broken home who has suffered at the hands of an abusive father. With nothing as such to tie her to the small backwater town where she has grown up, Yuki agrees to accompany him on his quest, offering sexual services to a lonely old man in order to raise the train fare to Tokyo.

During their journey, however, Koichi's aggressive and strange behaviour threatens to drive Yuki away, as he finds himself unable to break free of the religious dogma deeply engrained in him at the rough hands of the Nirvana cult. Freed from an environment where one's individual identity is forcibly submerged to that of the collective, at an age when children are stumbling to find their own individual place within the world, Koichi is suddenly pitched into deciding just what his role in society exactly is. -- Midnight Eye