Synopsis
When a hooded stranger appears in private eye 'Mike' Hama's office with the cryptic challenge "I want you to look for me," Hama is drawn into a string of bizarre serial murders that have Yokohama's police baffled and the city terrified.
The Trap
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Alternative Titles
Wana, 私立探偵 濱マイク 罠, 私立探偵 濱マイクシリーズ完結篇「罠 THE TRAP」, 덫, 陷阱
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Theatrical
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Japan
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Japan
25 May 1996
- Theatrical
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The final entry in the Maiku Hama detective trilogy feels like an Italian murder mystery (one of those more bonkers '80s ones) by way of Japan. It is thematically darker than both The Most Terrible Time in My Life and The Stairway to the Distant Past. From a visual standpoint this is a very colourful movie however, starkly contrasting the bleaker, horror influenced story.
It becomes fairly convoluted by the end, but that's probably just an inherent quality of these gumshoe movies.
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"My name is Peter Stillman. That is not my real name."
-Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)
"The name's Maiku Hama. My real name."The stakes just keep getting higher for our poor private eye. First he fights for his body, then they want his blood, and now he's engaged in a battle for his very soul. A fitting send off (although I hear there's a TV series, with an episode directed by none other than Alex Cox) for my favorite PI, played, as always, to perfection by Masatoshi Nagase. Hayashi's filmography seems to me to be critically underseen- his experimental edge keeps this whole thing bubbling with postmodernism more than the prior entries in the series, although it's nowhere near the levels of To Sleep, So As To Dream. Incredibly good stuff, unfairly slept on.
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*possible mild spoilers? idk*
"Having you return a loan is weird". Yup, for us too, Asa-chan. Maiku just isn't the same as a successful private eye with a burgeoning romantic life. We need the perennially-destitute-on-verge-of-societal-collapse Maiku back!
I was disappointed in what seemed like a standard 90s serial killer flick ala Alex Cross for the first 40 mins or so. Not to mention some totally confusing casting decisions hindered me from focusing on what was currently conspiring - including the non-sequitur of casting Tetta Sugimoto, who played The White Man's henchman Sugimoto in the last film, as a completely unrelated detective Yuzu in this one. I was also struggling to comprehend why Masatoshi was in double role, and at the… -
Trapped in between romance and a stylized murder mystery. Experimentation in psychedelic imagery. Cynically playful tone shifts. Introducing ambiguity, the kind found in horror films. Twists and turns into extra mysteries for us to solve; think about. Trying to save people is a trap. This is the hardest mystery that Masatoshi Nagase, who plays our powerhouse noir hero, had to endure and crack in this trilogy. This trilogy finale transforms into sudden abstraction in it's biggest moments and somehow works, which makes it earn it's feelings over logic approach here. Unto Maiku Hama's vacation... and a television series of his that I may watch.
Until next time...
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Noirvember #24
Kaizo Hayashi goes an interesting direction with the final film of his Maiku Hama trilogy, dropping the Yakuza threat for a psychological cat-&-mouse mystery with a masked killer. The director draws from the decade’s slasher iconography and post-Manhunter/Silence psycho-thrillers for his Yokohama stalker, taking a more-tortured-than-ever Nagase into the realm of horror and existential surrealism (especially given a certain casting choice here). A frame-up, car chase, creepy slasher attacks, more Jo Shishido, city gumshoes united, and a *very ‘90s* mental illness subplot find a compelling blend between Terrible Time’s wily pastiche and Stairway’s grim darkness. -
Maiku Hama caught in a gialli trap! Grim and often bleak in ways that the previous two entries aren't. Kaizo Hayashi's endless inventiveness has churned out a trilogy of genre flicks; each movie stylistically and thematically different to the last; which is as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Who would have foreseen Maiku falling into the world of horror; after navigating foreign gang relations and Japan's tumultuous memory of war? Who would have expected the series to nose dive into serial killers shenanigans and anti-cop antics? A fantastic movie to conclude an even more brilliant trilogy.
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At times my favourite in the trilogy. Maiku being framed for serial killing. Once again darker and bleaker in tone, kinda goes for fucked up psycho thriller elements in the vein of Giallo with questionable approach to mental illness and even looks to veer into surreal horror territory with dreamlike images and atmosphere. I'm not really sure what truly happened at the end , there was some mommy issues too throughout but wasn't entirely clear. Hayashi though once again does so very well to blend so many different things and you just have to love how film in the trilogy is so different from each another. Also was great seeing Shishido again, this time working with all the private detectives of the city trying to prove Maiku's innocence — that was very heartwarming. Overall once again genuinely good stuff and it's a shame they didn't make more of these and also a shame that these aren't available in good prints.
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Like Hayashi other Hama movies it expert mixes pastiche and real horror. Not surprising giving this is the third one he did in three years and their reinterative quality, it is hard to tell if it is Hama or Hayashi who feels the more trapped by the inttrigue. Diminishing returns, but he finds ways to make them mean something.
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Hard to say this all at the moment, long day and I'm emotionally overwhelmed, but this was the film that really solidified that I take genuine, profound comfort in Maiku Hama. Much more to come when I rewatch the whole trilogy but I think it's safe to say at this point that Kaizo Hayashi's Maiku Hama Trilogy is my favourite screen trilogy of all time.
On its own, though, The Trap amps up the nightmarish tendencies from Stairway that were wholeheartedly present in To Sleep So as to Dream fucking HARD here. A24 wishes. -
“I want you to look for me,” a sinister masked man requests of our dogged P.I. in the opening scenes of Hayashi’s final entry in his Maiku Hama trilogy; a fittingly oneiric start to a film whose jovial, freewheeling energy entropically comes to collapse into so much paranoia, wrong-man conspiratorial thinking, and speculation about the fractured other selves any of us might harbor deep in our heads. If the trilogy from the start was largely informed by so much giddy cinephilia, Hayashi caps it all off by taking that very air of unreality to its darkest possible places. “There’s another you on the lose,” Hama’s confidante explains about the mounting evidence against him surrounding a string of murders. “That is,…
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Just tremendous work. It kills me that they stopped at three, but what a trilogy this is! This film somewhat ditches the "first act comedy" -> "third act unbelievably dark thriller" structure in favor of synthesizing the two, and I really enjoy that. There's still laughs late in the runtime, but they're tinged with melancholy. It's remarkably humanistic, in a sense: the world is silly, but it's dangerous, and sometimes you have to do silly things to keep yourself and the people you love safe.
The story itself is notably different from the first two, replacing the gang wars with a more classic noir "find the mystery man" plot, inspired by films like The Third Man (which it homages), plus…
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One of the most rewarding rewatches I’ve done. Like finally closing the book on a case I couldn’t solve. (Sorry).
For a series that has had identity as such a core focus, my mistake was seeing this film as another examination of Mike himself and trying to piece everything from there.
The Trap actually swings far wider - directly at the genre itself. Hayashi’s full-tilt into surrealist, dream-logic filmmaking a deliberate act to remake the world of Mike Hama into ideals and concepts as much as actual characters.
There’s a reason Mike begins this story at the top of his game. It’s important that our loveably pathetic hero is fully formed, because he needs to be far more than just…
