What to watch at home in April

Anton Bitel pro­vides a look at six titles head­ing to stream­ing and phys­i­cal media releas­es this month that you should add to the top of your view­ing list.

“Wel­come to the real world,” a bank’s assis­tant man­ag­er (Song Young-chang) tells his employ­ee Im Dae-ho (Song Kang-ho), hav­ing just held him in, and then released him from, a vicious head­lock. ​“If you’re weak, you die.”

Dae-ho is a los­er who wants noth­ing more than to impress his dis­ap­point­ed father (Shin Goo), and to break free of his boss’s humil­i­at­ing hold over him. One day he spots an old wrestling gym­na­si­um, where a tat­tered poster promis­es com­bat tech­niques that are ​“applic­a­ble to dai­ly liv­ing!” — and so begins his dou­ble life, by day a banker, by night train­ing hard in wrestling (and actu­al­ly get­ting good at it). As these two worlds over­lap, Kim Jee-woon’s sec­ond fea­ture plays like a com­ic Kore­an rejoin­der to Fight Club.

Dae-ho longs to be a ​‘foul king’ like his for­mer hero Ultra Tiger Mask, who spe­cialised in cheat­ing tech­niques. As Dae-il pre­pares to meet pro Yubi­ho (Kim Soo-ro) in the ring, he must decide whether to accept once more his script­ed rôle of los­er, or to give the match his all and show the ​‘per­se­ver­ance’ that is his gym’s mot­to. Some­where in this ​‘grip­ping’ under­dog com­e­dy is a real-world lesson.

The Foul King is avail­able on dig­i­tal from 8 April via Blue Finch Films

“You can do 100 things right,” says king­pin Kang (Kim Yeong-che­ol) to his loy­al enforcer Kim Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun), ​“but one mis­take can destroy everything.”

These words will be played out by the rest of Kim Jee-woon’s gang­ster revenge film, as the Sun-woo, a fas­tid­i­ous aes­thete who likes to sweet­en his bit­ter espres­so with a sug­ar cube, and whose ele­gant dress and man­ner belie his thug­gish mar­tial skills, is about to see this clean, ordered world become a mud­dy, bloody chaos.

Sun-woo’s one mis­take, when assigned to keep an eye on Kang’s musi­cian girl­friend Hee-soo (Shin Min‑a) with the boss out of town, is to devel­op ten­der feel­ings and to dis­obey a direct order. Now his well-tem­pered life comes apart at the seams, and a new self emerges. Ensu­ing scenes of Taran­ti­no-esque may­hem, messy rebirth and ultra-vio­lent destruc­tion serve to drama­tise Sun-woo’s con­flict­ing inner desires as he shad­ow-box­es with him­self as much as tak­ing down every­one else.

This crazy genre-fied film, pos­si­bly just a roman­tic rever­ie, is no less cere­bral, psy­cho­log­i­cal, even spir­i­tu­al than it is vis­cer­al­ly thrilling, with untold depths reflect­ed in its bril­liant sur­face sheen.

A Bit­ter­sweet Life is avail­able on dig­i­tal from 8 April via Blue Finch Films

Yasu­jiro Ozu’s silent fea­ture comes with a curi­ous, para­dox­i­cal sub­ti­tle — ​“A Pic­ture Book For Grown Ups” — whose mean­ing is only grad­u­al­ly resolved. The first part is easy to under­stand: for as man­ag­er Yoshi (Tat­suo Saitō) moves his fam­i­ly to the Tokyo sub­urbs to be clos­er to the home of his company’s exec­u­tive Iwasa­ki (Takeshi Sakamo­to), this new envi­ron­ment is focalised through Yoshi’s young sons Ryoichi (Hideo Sug­awara) and Kei­ji (Tomio Aoki), who try to find their place amid the bul­ly­ing and pow­er plays of the oth­er local lads. This is a fun­ny, gen­tly observed boys’ own adven­ture, play­ing out Yoshi’s (inter­ti­tled) asser­tion, ​“All young boys should have a lit­tle mis­chief in them.”

Yet his two sons’ strug­gles for suprema­cy over the oth­er boys will bring them to ques­tion the impor­tance of their father, who they see behav­ing sub­servient­ly to Iwasa­ki, even though they now boss around Iwasaki’s son (Sei­ichi Kato). Their sub­se­quent dis­ap­point­ment and dis­il­lu­sion­ment is the first, ten­ta­tive taste of a very adult les­son about patri­archy and peck­ing order in Japan’s social hier­ar­chies. 27 years lat­er, Ozu would reimag­ine the film as Good Morn­ing, ring­ing the changes on this time­less prin­ci­ple with sound, colour and the advent of television.

I Was Born, But… is avail­able on the Blu-ray set Two Films by Yasu­jiro Ozu (also includ­ing There Was A Father, 1942) from 15 April via BFI

“Med­i­cine could do noth­ing more for Cyrus West, whose greedy rel­a­tives, like cats around a canary, had brought him to the verge of mad­ness,” reads an inter­ti­tle near the begin­ning of Paul Leni’s com­ic horror/​murder mystery.

In keep­ing with old West’s instruc­tions, exact­ly 20 years after his death those same rel­a­tives are assem­bled at his remote New York cas­tle to hear his last will and tes­ta­ment, and his most dis­tant rel­a­tive Annabelle (Lau­ra La Plante) is nom­i­nat­ed as heir to his for­tune. Yet with ghosts and an escaped lunatic said to be lurk­ing around the premis­es, with the next in line to West’s lega­cy still behav­ing like a preda­to­ry cat, and with the guests going miss­ing one by one, it is going to be a long night.

The first of six adap­ta­tions from John Willard’s pop­u­lar 1922 play, this silent film lands in the sweet spot between Leni’s Ger­man Expres­sion­ism and the camper Amer­i­can goth­ic of what would emerge as Uni­ver­sal hor­ror in the ear­ly Thir­ties. With plen­ty of trick­ery and treach­ery on screen to match the inven­tive arti­fice of the film itself, this is a stylised suc­ces­sion saga of mur­der and mad­ness, and a roman­tic melo­dra­ma with claws.

The Cat and the Canary is avail­able on Blu-ray from 22 April via Eureka

“I could tell you that I saw a mer­maid once sit­ting on the mud­dy bank, comb­ing her gold­en hair. But I’d be lying.”

So says the Video­g­ra­ph­er (Zhang Ming Fan), unseen nar­ra­tor and some­time focalis­er of Lou Ye’s vibrant fea­ture set in the grub­by river­side demi­monde of con­tem­po­rary Shang­hai. The videographer’s work brings him to Meimei (Zhou Xun), who does a mer­maid act in a seedy bar — but as their affair is shown from the POV of his own cam­era, that same hand­held doc­u­men­tary style is used to track the par­al­lel, per­haps inter­re­lat­ed love sto­ry of motor­bike couri­er Mar­dar (Jia Hong­sheng) who falls for, betrays and los­es his young ward Moudan (also Zhou Xun), only to become con­vinced, after a search for her span­ning many years, that she is in fact Meimei. Unless of course the Video­g­ra­ph­er makes the whole thing up, as a coun­ter­point to his own rather less com­mit­ted dal­liance with Meimei.

Like its cen­tral motif of a mer­maid, this mys­tery romance is a hybrid crea­ture, split between truth and fic­tion, ide­al­ism and cyn­i­cism, and unfold­ing along a riv­er where there are many sto­ries, where every­thing is in con­stant flux, and where even love may be just anoth­er myth.

Suzhou Riv­er is avail­able on Blu-ray from 29 April via Radiance

In blue-tinged mono­chrome, one astro­naut drags anoth­er across the lunar sur­face, and then aban­dons him there, as Pro­fes­sor Black­mann (Klaus Kin­s­ki) in the con­trol room looks on. This open­ing sequence from Lui­gi Bazzoni’s enig­mat­ic fea­ture is also the recur­ring night­mare of Alice Cam­pos (Florin­da Bolkan), a Por­tuguese-born inter­preter in Italy who, like a man alone on the moon, seems iso­lat­ed, alien­at­ed and lost in trans­la­tion. Alice’s dreams are based on a sci-fi movie she saw years ear­li­er that, hor­ri­fied, she had to leave before its end, nev­er learn­ing the pur­pose of Blackmann’s cru­el ​“exper­i­ment”.

After suf­fer­ing a three-day mem­o­ry black­out, Alice fol­lows cryp­tic clues (a torn-up pho­to, a blood-flecked dress) to the lim­i­nal island of Gar­ma and its Marien­bad-like hotel that she half-remem­bers (and whose guests half-remem­ber her). There, in keep­ing with her name, Alice goes down a rab­bit hole of alter egos, repres­sive par­ent­ing, lost love, déjà vu and dis­so­cia­tive iden­ti­ty dis­or­der. This is Lynch avant la let­tre, with an arche­typ­al para­noid-neu­rot­ic ​‘woman in trou­ble’ under­go­ing a psy­chogenic fugue in which she tries to trace, in the foot­prints of mys­tery and mad­ness, a mean­ing­ful yet for­ev­er mis­un­der­stood end­ing. Aston­ish­ing lunacy!

Foot­prints is avail­able on Blu-ray and dig­i­tal from 29 Apr via Shame­less Films