Stream It Or Skip It: ‘River’s Edge’ on Netflix, A Dour But Poignant Japanese Drama Adapted From ‘90s Manga

Netflix original film River’s Edge is a dark, brooding drama based on Kyoko Okazaki’s graphic novel, and director Isao Yukisada’s adaptation exhibits the fearlessness of the form. The story is bookended by the striking imagery of a flaming body falling out of a high-rise apartment and landing in a dumpster, and flashes back to preceding events, in which teenagers live out their aimlessly despondent days next to a heavily polluted stretch of water.

RIVER’S EDGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It almost looks beautiful — a towering industrial complex glows a deep, toxic-neon green reflecting off the river, smokestacks belching clouds over a slowly decaying Tokyo suburb. In front of that backdrop, a handful of high-schoolers sulk, fight and hump their way through their depressed lives. Adults are almost nowhere to be seen; structures are all crumbling and rusty; it’s the 1990s, and everything is grim.

Haruna Wakukasa (Fumi Nikaido) is the focal point of this angsty character drama. She ventures into her school’s cluttered and abandoned chemistry lab and finds Ichiro Yamada (Ryo Yoshizawa) naked, trussed up, beaten nearly unconscious and stuffed in a locker. Yamada’s gay but closeted, a punching bag for bullies; he’s dating Kanna Tajima (Aoi Morikawa), a permagrinning chatterbox, as a front. Yamada’s primary tormentor, Kannonzaki (Shuhei Uesugi), also happens to be Haruna’s boyfriend, although he’s secretly sneaking off with her promiscuous friend Rumi (Shiori Doi) to do drugs and have sex. Haruna and Yamada are also friends with Kozue Yoshikawa (Sumire Matsubara), a fashion model and actress who routinely binges heaps of junk food in the bathroom stall, then sticks her fingers down her throat.

In the tall, dead grasses along the riverbank, Yamara shows Haruna and Kozue his “treasure” — symbolism alert — a corpse that’s been there so long, it’s mostly a skeleton. They visit it regularly to meditate on their little personal hells, and probably the greater, polluted hell surrounding them, and possibly to find comfort in the warm inevitability of death. Most of the movie passes before any of them crack a legit smile.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There’s a little bit of the 1986 River’s Edge in it, considering both films feature disaffected teens staring coldly at a dead body, and curiously not bothering to contact authorities. The calloused high-schoolers in River’s Edge also have something in common with Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson in another graphic novel adaptation, Ghost World, but only if their characters were breathing in silt and wandering around in the dark not saying clever things.

Performance Worth Watching: Although the acting is uniformly strong, Nikaido carries the most weight here. She fosters insecurity and fear beneath Haruto’s profound numbness, lest the character struggle to court our sympathies. Nikaido shares numerous weighty and sincere moments with Yoshizawa, and their characters seem relatively assured of themselves and their moral standing, especially in comparison to their peers’ self-destructive paths.

Memorable Dialogue: “Let’s call a UFO,” Yamada says to Haruna one evening as they stand quietly on the bridge over the river on a chilly evening. “I’ve done it before, just once.” Such is the fantasy he believes is his only escape from this rotting, tragic place.

Single Best Shot: Oddly, the niftiest shot in this bleak movie is a funny one. Kozue peers through the wire-reinforced glass of the old chem lab, spying on Kannonzaki and Rumi as they skip class to have sex. The shadows of the commingling teens reflect in the glass as Kozue bites the end off a raw hot dog.

Sex and Skin: Yukisada doesn’t shy away from explicit, realistic and, in the case of the lunkheaded Kannonzaki, sometimes violent sex scenes. Bodily fluids are also graphically represented, so consider yourself warned.

Our Take: I’ll be blunt — River’s Edge is a bummer. But it’s well-made and -acted bummer, shot in a tight aspect ratio reflecting how hemmed-in these teenagers feel. Yukisada nurtures a sense of unease in the margins of the narrative; perhaps it’s impending environmental devastation that will melt them all into pus and glop, or maybe it’s just, gasp, graduation. Who knows. Although the screenplay is smartly structured and stirs up some provocative subtext outside the usual coming-of-age tropes, it can be overly ambitious, wedging in a pair of dopes who blabber on about local urban legends and supernatural whatnot while fishing the river, and wholly unnecessary documentary-style interviews with primary characters.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The movie is dour, and poignant, and dour, and poetic, and dour. But the positives outweigh the negatives, and it does end with a glimmer of hope among the gloom.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream River's Edge (2018) on Netflix