PENALTY LOOP Review – Fantasia International Film Festival 2024

“Penalty Loop” is an engaging pitch-black comedy thriller that feels like an emotional matchup of “Groundhog Day” and “Happy Death Day”.

Synopsis

When his girlfriend was murdered, part of Jun’s soul died with her. Since then, his only thought has been to take justice into his own hands. Having tracked down the murderer, Mizoguchi, and prepared a meticulous plan to achieve his aims discreetly, the time has come to take action. Jun slips in among his target’s colleagues, spices his coffee with poison and finishes him off out of sight. The perfect crime. The problem is that the next morning, he’s plagued by a feeling of déjà-vu. Worse still, Mizoguchi is back at work as if nothing had happened. Jun resumes his Machiavellian plan, but something goes wrong as his target seems far more suspicious than the day before.

Review
Another film I’ve been anticipating since it’s announcement at Fantasia International Film Festival is “Penalty Loop”, writer-director Shinji Araki’s black-comedy thriller about revenge, its pleasures and the unbreakable feeling known as grief. Starting off with striking its audience right in the feels, this Japanese language film begins with Jun (Ryûya Wakaba) witnessing his girlfriend’s lifeless murdered body. Once her murderer Mizoguchi (Yûsuke Iseya) is found, Jun gets to enact revenge and kill him. The only problem – he wakes up the next day and finds Mizoguchi, alive and walking as if nothing happened. Rinse and repeat, he wakes up the next day and finds the same result as before, Mizoguchi still alive…and slowly becoming aware of what’s been happening day-after-day. So begins the hellish time loop Jun finds himself in and coming to the realization that his target is becoming more and more increasingly hard to kill. “Penalty Loop” is a pitch-black mix of “Groundhog Day” and “Happy Death Day”, a subversive revenge film with dark humor and pathos.

As to the flow of the story, Shinji Araki’s film is filled with many twists and turns. He keeps his audience on a short leash, never fully keeping them off the handle while slowly revealing this film’s shrewd hand. The narrative has a sharp way of unfolding itself, making the audience think they know what’s happening and what’s coming and then shifting the ground from up under them thrice more. In addition to the twisty plot, the core performances of Wakaba and Iseya keep the narrative engaging. Ryûya Wakaba delivers a layered performance to the role of Jun, beginning the film as a man hellbent on vengeance for the love of his life but as the film progresses and the 24-hour loop increases, we see this anger scaled back to show a range of complex emotions. Wakaba no doubt carries this film alongside Iseya who delivers a great performance as Mizoguchi, a killer who, as the loop continues around and around, we start to witness who he is as a person as well as his motivations. This film is surprising as it not only has great twists within its plot but also within its character development. The way we see these characters as we begin this film is drastically different from how we see them when the film ends.

There’s a controlled, measured pace Shinji Araki keeps throughout “Penalty Loop”. As the story builds alongside its characters, the film takes you to emotional places you didn’t think it would. There’s a standout scene to note when Jun sees a ladybug flying in and around an arts and crafts project he is working on. He opens a window and sets the ladybug free. At first thought, this sounds like a throwaway scene but Araki keeps us focused on this scene for a reason. It’s hard to let grief go, it’s something that holds on even when you want to be done with it. As Jun lets the ladybug fly away, he thinks it’s easy to let his grief fly away by killing his girlfriend’s murderer over and over again. But grief is not so easy to erase like that, you have to dig deeper and even then…it still may not go away. That’s the underlying power of this film – on the surface, it’s a funny, violent story of revenge but behind the curtain, it’s a great study of grief. As the film ends and motivations become more clear in a heartbreaking emotional twist, the film’s ending lingers with you because there’s still the heartbreaking lesson in the air that grief is not something to evade or ignore, it’s to be experienced and endured…whether you want to or not.

Closing Thoughts
“Penalty Loop” is an interesting entry at the Fantasia International Film Festival. Its genre flips from drama to thriller are right up the festival’s alley and its subversion of execution is right at home. This only being his second feature, there is no doubt to a bright future ahead for director Shinji Araki. The same can definitely be said for actors Ryûya Wakaba and Yûsuke Iseya who have great chemistry as predator and prey and as like-minded souls trapped in a hellish cycle. For lovers of films set in clockwork universes and pitch-black comedies, this is the one to see.

Trailer