PLOT: Carter (Cole Sprouse), an American livestreamer, stumbles upon a collection of vintage Levi’s dating back to the 1800s. Hearing that he could get hundreds of thousands for the immaculately maintained collection, he travels to Japan, where he hooks up with a fan, Izumi (Kiko Mizuhara), who, along with her degenerate gambler boyfriend, Hiro (Nijiro Murakami), has her own plans for the priceless denim.
REVIEW: Of all the directors working in the genre space to emerge over the last few years, Eugene Kotlyarenko seems to be the one most intrigued by the notion of how chronically online people are nowadays. His last film, Spree, followed a rideshare driver livestreaming his murders. Vintage Violence follows another livestreamer, albeit a much nicer one in Cole Sprouse’s Carter. Not a horror film like Spree, this is instead a crime caper with the occasional heavy dose of gore, which was enough to secure it a spot in this year’s Midnight Madness lineup.
While short on substance, Kotlyarenko’s movie is admirably propulsive and filled with some unique touches. He seems heavily influenced by the kind of Japanese V-Cinema quickies that used to have a big market in the States, with Carter’s caper putting him in the crosshairs of the Yakuza, meaning lots of Japanese gangland violence is peppered throughout the plot. The main bad guy, an exiled Yakuza boss named Ko (Pierre Taki), feels like he walked out of a Takashi Miike movie. Having lost a finger to Yakuza tradition, he’s replaced it with a metal finger that sprays him with a mix of fentanyl, meth, and ketamine that keeps him constantly high. Who would have figured that in a TIFF lineup featuring a legit Miike movie (Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo), this much lower-budget American movie would feel more like one of his films than the real deal?
Despite some fun touches, Kotlyarenko’s film does spin its wheels a little too much, running a longer-than-expected 105 minutes. A movie edited like this one, where TikTok livestreams are a big part of the plot, really needs to be tighter, as it starts to feel like an endurance test. Even still, the performances are fun, with the drop-dead gorgeous Kiko Mizuhara leading the cast as the duplicitous but sympathetic Izumi, who lures Carter to Japan and takes advantage of the smitten American. She’s so dazzling-looking that one wonders how she’d end up with a loser like Hiro, who spends much of the film dressed in Sailor Moon-style bondage gear after being waylaid by Ko.
Cole Sprouse is a likable lead as the clueless American who is left to his own devices in Tokyo. Rather affable, you believe him as a guy who could gain an online following, and the movie has fun digging into the obsessive way the terminally online follow their favorite content creators. He’s separated from his iPhone early on and finds himself almost completely helpless, especially as a criminal record keeps him from getting much help from the American Embassy, with a mustache-wearing diplomat proving spectacularly unhelpful (a well-placed photo of the current president earned a big laugh at the TIFF screening).
Again, though, it goes on too long, with lengthy asides, including a chunk of the film set in Izumi’s grandmother’s house, making it feel like Kotlyarenko is just letting the plot spin its wheels a little too much. Despite the low budget, the film looks terrific, with impressive cinematography by Sean Price Williams and a well-curated soundtrack. Right now, it’s an OK movie, but with a little tightening up, it could be a pretty good one.
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