Shadow of Fire: Tsukamoto Shinya’s unnerving conclusion to his anti-war trilogy

Prolific since his breakthrough independent works of the 1980s and 90s (the Tetsuo films among them), Tsukamoto Shinya’s directorial output has slowed in the last decade. But the features that have emerged during this time offer deft explorations of how war damages people on and off battlefields, and the abject horror involved in the act of killing. Shadow of Fire (2023) concludes his anti-war trilogy – discussed as such by the filmmaker – with characteristically unnerving form. 
 
Based on Ooka Shohei’s novel, Fires on the Plain (2014) tracked a soldier trying to survive on a Pacific Island at the end of the Second World War. Killing (2018), meanwhile, followed a pacifist samurai in late Edo period Japan, whose ideals are pushed to breaking point. Shadow of Fire takes Tsukamoto back to World War II, though one of the film’s more fascinating qualities is how period signifiers are largely abstracted. While there are allusions to the period in the script, minimalist costuming, vague geography and spare sets bathed in darkness contribute an opaque quality that bolsters Tsukamoto’s themes: this terror is likely from one era, but it could also be any time, the future included. 
 
This abstraction extends to a near-total absence of character names. The protagonist, a little boy (the astounding Tsukao Oga), is orphaned by firebombing, the only child present in a world of adults who’ve succumbed to varying forms of insanity in the aftermath of war, where the black market conquers mutual aid in a time of restricted resources. The orphan becomes a commodity himself across the diptych narrative – part claustrophobic chamber drama, part road movie. For a young widow (Shuri), he can substitute the child she lost, while a shellshocked veteran (Kono Hiroki), joining their doomed makeshift family living in a charred tavern, finds brief comfort in educating the lad. In the film’s second half, Tsukao’s character finds a loaded handgun, making the boy an asset for a revenge-driven demobilised soldier (Moriyama Mirai), who recruits him as an unwitting accomplice to the murder of a superior officer who ordered war crimes. 
 
Akimoto Shuji, the assassin, is one of the only characters to declare his own name and reckons with his horrific actions with some honesty. But the refusal to bury the past seems a futile gesture when doing so continues to spread violence to the next generation, who are given no choice but to bear the pain and consequences. With his searing ‘period’ parable, Tsukamoto viscerally reckons with how the flames of any war corrode everything and everyone their burning light touches, long after they’ve been extinguished. 

► Shadow of Fire is now streaming on all major platforms.