Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan: At a Confessional (2025)

Expected more bizarre horror.

After that synopsis I think I expected something more wacky. As someone who went into the lore clueless, with no prior knowledge of the source material, maybe my expectations were misplaced.

They dropped the masterpiece of popcorn with pigeons scenes so early on, everything that followed seemed so… mid. That said, the concept of the curse was extremely interesting - a curse that does not necessarily bring you pain and misfortune, but makes you actively avoid happiness.

The performances were great. Somehow even the overacted moments perfectly fitted whatever scene was happening on the screen.

For the production - while the movie looks stunning, I cannot move past the fact that at least partially the soundtrack was “composed” by AI.

Overall, I guess I expected more? It for sure leaned more towards slow paced dark fantasy, rather than exaggerated horror.

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Wow…

Man these Kishibe Rohan movies are really something else… who comes up with this stuff? It is utterly BIZARRE and I’m here for it. So this Japanese guy comes to Italy as a laborer and meets this other poor tortured Japanese laborer (how many Japanese are there in Italy? Probably not a lot, what’s the likelihood? Oh well..) who hasn’t eaten for 5 days. Well instead of offering him a sandwich when he asked for food, the mean laborer pretends to give him a sandwich and then takes it away and forces him to do his share with the promise of earning that sandwich. He is so cruel to his fellow Japanese man, and the poor tortured laborer basically fall down the stairs from extreme weakness and dies. Then as the mean Japanese laborer watches, the dead laborer’s spirit comes and curses the mean guy, saying at the height of his happiness he will meet his worst downfall. But did this incident change the mean guy into a good person with humility? No way. He is just as mean as he always was. And he is hit with one stroke of luck after another- the happiness curse, which is an ominous sign that something terrible is about to happen. So the mean guy tries to subdue and suppress his happiness by always tying himself with omens of bad luck like black cats and broken mirrors, but they don’t exactly work which just shows that those bad omens are also a lie.

Kishibe Rohan happens to hear this mean guy’s confession in a booth at a church in Venice. I thought it was kind of funny because it’s possible that neither of them were Catholic as far as the viewer knows, and if it was a real priest, he would have started with the invocation of the Christian trinity and ending the confession with an absolution of sins, but he just remained silent. And the mean guy was just like “Can I be saved?” lol… that should have been a clue that whoever was listening was not a priest. And Rohan also happened to be Japanese hah what are the chances? The mean guy wears a mask during his confession and I thought that was interesting- the symbolism of masks throughout the movie and the setting of Venice complements that.

Well there is this grotesque scene with the spirit of the tortured dead Japanese man coming back in the form of his daughter’s tongue which is so weird and off putting that I had to remove a star just for that scene- it was so unnecessary in my opinion- they could have done that same concept but with some other visuals, because this was just gross. But anyways, Rohan was awesome as always, and I feel like he was just caught in this weird situation and dragged into it, along with the mean guy’s daughter who is also bound by the same curse. Then for some reason Rohan seems to be hit with the same happiness curse as well. But Rohan is a rather comforting reassuring presence in a. Weird chaotic world, and that’s why his character is just so awesome. Takahashi gives life to that character in a way no one else could. And I love how he comes to Italy and starts speaking in Italian like his software just updated, and the same thing with French in the last movie. And he reads people like books because well.. everywhere you go, people are the same. So he is confident in himself no matter where he goes. H elbows who he is and is not swayed by the culture or its people. I like that.

As for the mean Japanese guy, his confession was essentially useless not just because he wasn’t talking to a priest nor received absolution, but rather because he had no remorse for what he had done, and had not changed himself at all. He was still the same terrible person, just trying not to die from the curse, and he was ready to ruin a anyone’s life including his own daughter’s in order to not die from the curse.

What was the moral of the story? I suppose none, except for seeing how Rohan stayed in his worn center the whole time, even though he helped people, he didn’t lose who he was to the curse, Italy, or any person.

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