by Michael Frank, Spring 2020
The first viewing of One Cut of the Dead is absolutely mind-numbing. The second viewing is practically irresistible.
In nothing short of a cinematic gambit Shinichirou Ueda’s sophomore film intentionally sets up a first act that appears clunky, awkward, and generally not very good. What’s most ambitious is that he does it all for the sake of a payoff that is deferred until about an hour in. The first 30 minutes of the film’s runtime, by design, are a huge leap of faith—an act of suicide in the current state of media, where the currency of attention is in incredible demand. Shoddy camerawork, stilted performances, and simply bizarre choices become impossible to ignore. But why?
It’s like hanging a “Do Not Enter” sign on your movie. It is not until past the midway point of the film, when you are welcomed into the joke and feel as though you had been watching a 3D film with no glasses. As a film with no big stars and a paltry budget, One Cut of the Dead boldly leans into its esoteric nature and willingly resorts to full B-List status. The outcome is one of the greatest cinematic punchlines of its kind.
It is tempting to see One Cut as a total anomaly, just as it is tempting to brand any exciting new work as an “original.” However, setting it alongside other films helps our understanding of its form and tactics—and there is plenty to understand.
Just last year, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019), incorporated the genre-shift sleight of hand that the “One Cut” executes and it became a key component to the film’s identity. However, while Parasite boasted a big-name director, locally recognizable cast, and a proper 11.4 million dollars budget, One Cut of the Dead operated on practically no promotion and a fraction of that budget. About .2% of that budget, to be precise. Ironically enough, this serves as a leg up in the feats that the picture is able to pull off.
One of Parasite’s biggest shortcomings was the, albeit inevitable, scale of its launch. Ideally, though unrealistically, no trailer would be required for any movie. Perhaps we’d be better off having built-in radar that would go off every time a good movie got released. In Parasite’s debut preview, while little contextual content is laid face-up, the direction of the story’s tone is made all too apparent. Ominous music sets the stage for a number of second act beats included in the Oscar-winning picture, coloring the expectations of even the most inattentive viewer. Probably the greatest sin of the ad is a featured Vulture blurb that simply says “You expect Parasite to be one thing, but it mutates into something else.” Made skittish by the dense mystery that its story holds, Parasite reassures foreign audiences that its seemingly opaque text hides an exciting secret. That alone is a crime.
Many fans of the trailer compliment its conservative use of spoilers and its prowess in misdirection, but the promotional piece directs expectation towards a weakened impact. The universe-toppling reveal that serves as Parasite’ s centerpiece and strikingly punctual midpoint is turned from devastating to cathartic: “So that’s what the trailer was talking about!”
One Cut of the Dead, on the other hand, treats its trailer in a delightfully dismissive way. The opening line of the preview is a paragraph that reads:
“One Cut of the Dead is being called ‘the best zombie comedy since Shaun of the Dead.’ It’s full of hilarious surprises—some of which we’re about to spoil. You should skip the trailer and go get your tickets instead.”
This blurb is made particularly glib when you realize that the film had practically no theatrical run and received almost all of its international viewership through streaming on the service Shudder. Even in Japan, the film barely existed outside the festival circuit. With a smaller-budgeted film, not bolstered by any big names, the process of promotion becomes tertiary to the film’s existence. Parasite, however, was defined by its promotion, and the manner by which the trailer presented the film would infect the discourse around it. “You expect Parasite to be one thing, but…” seemed to be a keystone of all word-of-mouth promotion that the film would enjoy. For all of the prestige and budgetary liberty the Best Picture winner rode on, One Cut walked in empty-handed—a fact that would end up being the film’s greatest blessing.
Part of what makes One Cut of the Dead such a fun walking-out-of-the-theater movie—the kind where you can’t even wait to stand up before you start gushing over it—is its evasion of its own genre. In fact, the zombie-slasher components of One Cut seem incidental by the time the credits properly roll. The trailer’s allusion to Shaun of the Dead is also a dubious comparison, though perhaps an inevitable one. As any cop-comedy flick will be compared to Hot Fuzz, zombie-comedies will invariably end up with their own Edgar Wright nod. This gravitation towards Western film comparison is to be expected from the surge of English-speaking viewers that got a taste of Shinichirou Ueda’s new release through Shudder in late 2018. This perspective, however, cheapens the massive leaps from convention that One Cut takes.
While Western zombie-comedy has its roots going back to 1985 with Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead, a stream of undead budget pictures has been flowing from Asia years since the 90s. James McRoy covers this millennial boom in his text “Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema.” Ryuhei Kitamura’s 2000 picture, Versus, reimagined the zombie format in this laugh-out-loud, zombies v. Yakuza, cult hit. Despite sweeping national film festivals, the comedy-slash-em-up made almost no splash stateside. Wilson Yip’s Bio-Zombie, launched two years prior in Hong Kong, only to live out a similar existence. In fact, the niche of Asian zombie-comedy had grown into a veritable sub-genre while most Westerners had their backs turned.
One Cut of the Dead ostensibly operated on the same playing field as its peers—no international superstars involved and a five-figure budget. Leung Wing-Fai covers the challenges of this kind of cultural export in “Importing Genre, Exporting Cult: The Japanese Zom-Com.” Not many Americans are open to such a specific genre-film from overseas. Though the film had more to it than a typical zombie spoof, you wouldn’t guess it from the poster. Was the product really such a standout that it had no option other than international success? To look at the glowing reviews from critics in the New York Times or with The Guardian, it seems as though the answer would be “clearly.”
Does this interpretation rely on the bias that international acclaim equates to raw quality? Was Parasite’ s success on the global stage a mark of its quality over any of Bong Joon Ho’s previous work? Part of that picture’s acclaim was how “universal” its messaging was: A Korean film for everyone. Perhaps it is the not-very-Japanese nature of “One Cut” that led to its cult success on a global stage and thus its triumph as a film from a historically undermined niche. Though compared to Western zombie-comedies, like Zombieland: Double Tap, launched a couple months later in 2019, One Cut of The Dead feels like a triumph in its own right.
It should be noted that the Japanese and South Korean film industry are not the same. In fact, given the history of each country over the past century, they’re not even particularly similar. For the naive Western viewer, however, it is hard to lift the umbrella label of “foreign film” from a film that is foreign. Equally, when a film is branded as being “universal,” in any part of the world, one could easily read the coded meaning of that identifier as “universal for me.” But as any major release worth its salt (and budget) knows, domestic audiences can’t always be trusted to pay the bills. The decision to not dwell on too many cultural specifics in either film could be chalked up to an artistic choice, a foresight of marketing, an unplanned outcome, or a combination of the three. Either way, the payoff abroad speaks for itself.
Now, unfortunately (and it really is unfortunate), to discuss the film beyond the most vague abstractions and speculations, I must spoil the plot. I would argue that in building hype up until this point, I have in a sense already spoiled it in provoking the expectation of a narrative twist worth spoiling. Just as a viewer of The Sixth Sense who doesn’t know the twist, but knows of the twist, is likely to guess the film’s outcome, going into One Cut of the Dead with any sort of expectations diminishes the film’s power. Perhaps this is the inextricable nature of hype in general and all films are better off being presented as “Nothing Special,” regardless of quality. Really, this paragraph is just a buffer to give those who haven’t seen this movie yet a chance to reconsider what they’ve been doing up until this point. It’s no use, is it?
Well, this paragraph really is your last chance. Alright.
One Cut opens on a tight shot of an actress in cheap blood makeup being closed in upon by an actor in cheap zombie makeup. The girl holds up an ax and timidly threatens to use it on the zombie, who we assume to be her lover. Given the aesthetic of the film– genuinely less visually pleasing than some higher-end YouTube videos– within the first seconds we are served a spoonful of doubt. The zombie shambles to the girl and bites her. In the moments as she goes limp, we hear a voice in the distance yell ‘cut!’ The director walks on and starts criticizing the actors’ mediocre performances. Within the first moments of One Cut, the universe that the film establishes suddenly melts away—all completely uninterrupted by any cuts. Already the title’s promise of a “one-take” has amounted to more than just a technical gimmick.
The entrance of the director makes for a twist that comes as a major relief for the audience, realizing that the film is also somewhat in on the joke. Hearing a director mock the actors colors the tone with a shade of irony—a factor that will prove essential as the narrative further unravels.
The camera pulls back, revealing a small crew. The camera lazily roams the setting as they debrief. Already, you get the suspicion that the film is holding its cards close to its chest.
And, as promised, no cuts.
Aside from being a promising premise for horror—a stunt only attempted before in rare suspense flicks like Rope—the device has profound visual effects. We begin to inhale the environment, undistracted, appreciating it as a character in itself. The film is set in a dilapidated factory in a thicket of ethereal trees and weeds. This balance of nature and industry creates a troubling beauty that makes regular appearances in Japanese film and text. The quiet moments between dialogue, a lot of which almost certainly would have been cut, only heighten this effect. So, even when other visuals fail due to budgetary restrictions (genuine or fictitious), the promise in the title One Cut of the Dead adds up to more than just a horror premise.
However, doubts begin to emerge regarding this setup, as we hit patches that very much seem like they should have been cut. Really: There’s no other explanation for some of this stuff. In the sections following the first film-in-a-film reveal, characters pause between lines for ungodly portions of time, while some spots feel downright improvised. When “real” zombies attack the set of the film, effects become laughable and the tone falls apart. Maybe this $10,000 film couldn’t afford some much-needed reshoots?
What is really happening in this portion of “One Cut” is a beautiful balancing act– not completely losing the audience to the setups that will blossom into the film’s finest punchlines.
Assuming the viewer didn’t already turn the movie off by now, at the 30-minute mark they will witness a turning point. After the carnage resolves, an (unsteady) crane shot holds over a pentagram of blood and credits roll. The audience doesn’t even have time to untangle the incoherent plot of the film because their internal clock is kicking in. One Cut has already deftly cued the audience that things are not as they appear. Even the most passive audience members will feel this destruction of expectation.
While most movies indulge in sights and sounds, there are very few mainstream films that draw direct attention to their use of time. Christopher Nolan’s Memento is told in reverse, but this use of time is based in structure, not pacing. Michael Snow’s 1967 experimental film Wavelength meticulously zooms in on a picture over the course of 45 minutes, making the audience feel every passing second and sense every slight movement. However, the arthouse project makes little attempt at plot. One Cut of the Dead makes the audience strikingly aware of its runtime, something that most films would avoid at all costs, all for the sake of driving home the first major twist: you weren’t even watching the “real” movie.
When the credits end, a fade in brings us to a city skyline and (behold!) a cut. Many cuts, in fact. The film immediately shifts in pace, tone, and ostensible quality as well. One Cut now looks like a typical, mid-budget, comedy, though the weirdness doesn’t stop there.
The second act opens with the director from the film-in-a-film (which we will now refer to as ‘Kamera o Tomeru Na!’), as an “actual” director. He shoots dramatic reenactments for a local news station, which he is largely dispassionate about and not very good at. It’s immediately plain that he’s something of a sham. We meet his daughter, a filmmaker herself, who is focused on authenticity at any cost. The plot has already taken a u-turn, but the film truly inverts on itself when the director is given an offer—directing a zombie film in one take for a live television broadcast.
Whereas the first act was presented as found footage, where characters don’t acknowledge the camera (usually), act two makes the camera invisible. In that sense, we begin thinking less about form and focus on the narrative of watching a director make a film.
At first glance, this turning point, built on thirty minutes of setup, has come in the wrong order. Is this plot twist not just a piece of exposition? If the framing device for the zombie film was that it is an in-film production, shouldn’t that have been explained to us? Our untainted first viewing of the film is imperative to the ultimate impact that the film leaves, as will become apparent.
After a round of opening credits (about 40 minutes in, with in-film character names), One Cut dives into the assembly of the cast and crew of the project. In this portion, we get to see some familiar faces of actors who will be in the movie. Even though the process is fictitious, we begin to feel increasingly conscious of the production behind both ‘Kamera o Tomeru Na!’ and One Cut of the Dead. Even those who usually would never evaluate how a film is acted or directed are warmly encouraged to do so.
The final act of the film depicts the process of the film shoot itself and it is here where the audience witnesses the solar eclipse of narrative to which all of One Cut of the Dead had been building. And it truly feels like a once in a lifetime experience.
Right before the shoot starts, the original lead actor drops out, forcing the “real” director to play the role of director in his own movie. The levels of this Matryoshka doll only compile. The shoot kicks off and we can finally see how this film was shaped and it is nothing short of a romp. Factors outside of the film, which we didn’t understand until now, taint the project and shape the work that we had originally experienced at face-value. Drunk actors miss cues, effects don’t go as planned, and actors are forced to improvise to keep the live shoot from falling apart. The comedy of errors inherent with collaboration becomes an enlightening spectacle.
We also can finally enjoy the punchline for a joke we didn’t even realize was being set up. The entire first 30 minutes of One Cut of the Dead were made awkward and clunky by design for the sake of highlighting the chaos of collaborative coordination. Without any overt messaging, our attention is naturally drawn to the creative process behind “One Cut” and the form of film.
All of these components tie together in the final minutes of the film: The closing shot of the “movie” is thrown into calamity when the crane meant to achieve the shot is broken. To fill in for this loss, unseen to the viewers of ‘Kamera o Tomeru Na!’, the cast and crew pile into a human pyramid to lift the camera and get the bird’s eye shot. They hold in this painful position for nearly a full minute to create what we had once understood as a shaky crane shot.
The director-turned-actor smiles at his daughter once the live shoot wraps and she holds up a picture: A toddler-aged girl holding a camera on her father’s shoulders. A final fade on their grinning faces leaves a taste that would have been completed unexpected 90 minutes prior. And it is deliciously sweet.
The third act feels like a making-of feature on ‘Kamera o Tomeru Na!’. We see the camera from act one and have been guided into full awareness of the movie’s construction. In being so self-conscious, this portion feels more “real” than the found footage version, even if it is filled with cuts and edits. One Cut of the Dead managed to do a live dissection of itself and then reassemble, just so we could understand the incredible biology under the skin.
The “one take feature” is nothing new and, in fact, already feels tired after only a handful of releases under the classification. What’s more, it seems like these movies are always apologetically justifying their own existence. Why was Sam Mendes’s 1917 constructed in one take, for instance? It feels like an embarrassing conversation to have, as it is a huge part of the film’s identity, yet it is a necessary one. One Cut completely avoids this uncertainty. The gimmick is not only seamlessly baked into the plot, but it completes the narrative and philosophy of the film.
The title One Cut of the Dead is itself a promise of technical feats. Even though there end up being hundreds of cuts in the film, it does not renege on its promise. Rather, it doubles down on it by performing narrative gymnastics in the form of its operational aesthetic.
Operational aesthetic is the structural beauty that makes up engaging art. Narratively speaking, this is the gratifying intermingle between graceful cause and effect in a story. The operational aesthetic of One Cut of the Dead capitalizes on innate understanding of film structure and uses those expectations to amplify the catharsis of a satisfying outcome.
The most impressive component of the film is not the 30-minute opening take, as we may anticipate, but its spectacular structure. One Cut heightens its own journey and construction through a tactic that has existed for centuries in powerful storytelling.
Playwright Bertolt Brecht, in many of his texts, emphasized the thoughts and evolution of his players towards the specific outcome of the journey they are undergoing. For instance, in Brecht’s Life of Galileo, a number of scenes would begin with a character explaining the ending of the segment to the audience before properly beginning. Shakespearian tragedies, such as Romeo and Juliet, utilize similar tools: “In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,// From ancient grudge break to new mutiny…” Contemporary works such as Better Call Saul take on the status of a prequel to highlight the complexities of a character’s journey towards a known endpoint. The structure of One Cut of the Dead evokes a Brechtian quality, in the sense that it promotes a “how” over a “what” in the course of its narrative. While disruptive to conventions of storytelling, this format draws attention to the authorial hand and puts the cast’s transformation under a magnifying glass. One Cut of the Dead employs this tactic, but to a more technical end.
A love of filmmaking lays at the heart of One Cut and the structure of the film is designed to highlight the complexities, oddities, and ultimate beauty of a collaborative creative process. By opening the film with the uncut broadcast of ‘Kamera o Tomeru Na!’, we take the content at face value upon first viewing. It is not until One Cut of the Dead loops back on itself in its final act that we are able to acknowledge the craft behind the fictional picture and, ultimately, the whole film itself.
The making-of-mockumentary style of the film’s conclusion evokes a Brechtian quality, where the “what” is the product itself and the “how” is the very process of filmmaking itself. To show under the hood in this way makes vulnerable the entire process behind One Cut of the Dead’s creation, even if it is an exaggerated, fictionalized one. The narrative context of a micro-budget horror movie created for a major horror production company is not too far off from the actual circumstances of the film’s creation, as well. Within this vulnerability are the most powerful moments in One Cut’s repertoire.
A long take itself is designed to draw attention to the form of filmmaking, but the justification for its use can feel tenuous when scrutinized. However, unlike 1917 or Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014), One Cut of the Dead uses the technique with an adversity to narcissism. In his project’s structure, the writer-director, Shinichirou Ueda, rejects the credit that these technically impressive “one cut” films often funnel towards their authors. He doesn’t even play the filmmaker in his own movie, possibly to turn us away from this erroneous outcome. The human pyramid plainly embodies the true process, but not without being satisfying from a narrative standpoint. In a film about filmmaking, it only feels right that viewers constantly be evaluating both the form and those who crafted it. By honestly showing these moments of jury-rigged craftsmanship, One Cut weaves its narrative and form into a film before our eyes.
During the real, actual, final credit roll of the movie, we are shown footage of the real, actual production of the film. After an entire movie of being lied to, how do we know that this is real? We must take One Cut on its final word. This moment, however, is possibly the most powerful part of the film.
While this may just feel like a cooldown lap after the cathartic burst of the final act, in these 4 minutes of footage, One Cut of the Dead plays good on everything that it has promised up until this point. While a movie can never (and certainly should never) force viewers to read every name in the credits, One Cut probably comes closer to achieving this effect than any other conventional film. When a handheld camera zooms out to reveal the real crew assembling the project of which we have grown so conscious, the final sense of awareness settles. The fingerprints of the many-hundred hands that have touched the project are worthy of an awareness beyond the acknowledgment of their names. Beyond the worth of a writer, director, or cinematographer. One Cut of the Dead is form incarnate.
The final piece of footage in the entire movie (really, really) is a shot of the cameraman climbing a ladder to film what we would understand to be the “human pyramid shot.” The film finally showed us how it pulled the rabbit out of the hat, but we are beyond caring. Our appreciation outweighs our awareness because that awareness is the very source of our appreciation. Rarely do we ever get such a profound look under the hood of a film and even more rarely does a project delight so thoroughly in showing us the parts in motion. And thanks to One Cut of the Dead’s genuine love of its craft, for 90 minutes, anyone can love filmmaking.
Bibliography
Balmain, Colette. Introduction to Japanese Horror Film. University of Edinburgh Press, 2008.
Bradshaw, Peter. “One Cut of the Dead review – zombie films get a shot in the arm.” The Guardian, January 4, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/04/one-cut-of-the-dead-review-zombie-movie
McRoy, James. Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Brill Publishing, 2008.
Murphy, Kayleigh. “Sake, sex and gore: The Japanese zombie film and cult cinema.” Asian Cinema 26:2, October 2015, 193-203.
Terry, Katelyn. “Contorted Bodies: Women’s Representation in Japanese Horror Films.” Film Matters 9:2, September 2018, 57-68.
Vincentelli, Elisabeth. “One Cut of the Dead Review: A Fresh Take on the Zombie Flick.” The New York Times, December 25, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/25/movies/one-cut-of-the-dead-review.html
Wing-Fai, Leung. “Importing Genre, Exporting Cult: The Japanese Zom-Com.” Asian Cinema 22:1, March 2011, 110-121.
Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo. “J-HORROR: New Media’s Impact on Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 16:2, Fall 2007, 23-48.