Vintage Violence

Initially worlds apart, disgraced American urban explorer Carter (Cole Sprouse) and his Japanese online follower Izumi (Kiko Mizuhara) are drawn together in an impromptu business venture after Carter uncovers a cache of rare vintage jeans that could fetch a fortune in Japan’s collectors market.

But Izumi’s helpful overture masks a deceitful plot advanced by her boyfriend Hiro (Nijiro Murakami), who plans to steal the denim to repay a debt to a Levi’s-obsessed crime boss. The double-cross soon draws all parties into the path of Ko (Pierre Taki), an exiled Yakuza enforcer armed with a “speedball” drug spray for a middle finger and a resolve to wreak revenge on the criminal underworld. Chaos proceeds to reign, “like, comment, and subscribe” and the ol’ ultraviolence “follows” for more.

Recalling the freewheeling sensibilities of a Japanese V-Cinema exploitation film, Vintage Violence is the latest “chronically online” caper from internet-age satirist Eugene Kotlyarenko (Spree). Meshing his signature collage of digital screens and subjects with the stylized milieu of a Gakuryū Ishii or Takashi Miike movie, Kotlyarenko fashions a funny, hyper-contemporary comic thriller that seeds irreverence and romance with a candid authenticity, despite an elastic relationship with realism.

Sprouse and Mizuhara’s effortless charisma supports this high-wire tone, endearingly inhabiting a star-crossed pair whose connection is first sparked, and then literally propelled, by their digital devices. As does the film’s captivating aesthetic coherence, in part courtesy of Sean Price Williams’ visceral cinematography, which reliably captures all of its madcap hijinks through livestreams, pachinko parlours, and strikingly original, technology-driven foot chases through Tokyo.

PETER KUPLOWSKY

TIFF Next Wave: Celebrating the highs and lows (and everything in between) of young voices in today’s fast-moving world. This film has been selected for the next generation of film lovers by the TIFF Next Wave Committee.

Content advisory: explicit violence, accident trauma, coarse language, drug use, mature themes, sexual content