Part of the 2023 season: Always Evolving

Joint

JOINT, JOINT

Director KOJIMA Oudai

Cast YAMAMOTO Ikken, KIM Jin-Cheol, MITSUI Keisuke

2021, 118 min, English Subtitles

Takeshi (YAMAMOTO Ikken) returns to Tokyo after serving two years in prison. He aims to go straight, but in order to do so, he must first dive back into the criminal world to earn money. Catching up with his past yakuza contacts, he starts a business selling personal data for fraud schemes. Encouraged by his best friend Yasu (MITSUI Keisuke), Takeshi enters a venture capital business and turns himself into an investor. His path, however, is not an easy one – Takeshi soon finds himself dragged back into the underworld, with the Oshima-Kai – the largest criminal group in the Kanto region, to whom Takeshi has ties to – about to start a major clash with their excommunicated group.

Reminiscent of crime films such as Goodfellas and The Big Shot, this film marks KOJIMA Oudai’s directorial debut. The film depicts the ongoing underworld of modern Japan with a documentary-like aesthetic. Having quite a different tone from conventional Yakuza films, which are full of physical violence, this film is more on the intellectual side.