[VIFF 2020] REVIEW: ‘Special Actors’ is a sweet-hearted but predictable comedy

Kazuto Osawa and Hiroki Kono in Special Actors, directed by Shin'ichirô Ueda.

At first blush, the core premise of Special Actors might sound far-fetched. The titular small Japanese company hires out actors to help their clients with a variety of social problems. Need a guy to threaten you in the street so you can punch him out and impress a girl? How about staging an elaborate test for the employees at your restaurant? Special Actors has you covered. But it’s all grounded in reality - so much so that none other than Werner Herzog has already made a movie about the industry.

This time, our entry point into this odd profession is the cripplingly shy Kazuto (Kazuto Osawa, playing a fictionalized version of himself). Kazuto is beset by an emotional illness that causes him to faint when he’s confronted by male authority figures, due to some hazy event in his past with his father. Kazuto tries to attend auditions, but the fainting spells make it impossible to carry on a scene. Out of money, he has a chance encounter with his younger brother Hiroki (Hiroki Kono), who Kazuto hasn’t seen for years, and who works for the aforementioned agency. Hiroki drags Kazuto to meet his colleagues, and slowly involves Kazuto in their gigs, hoping it will help Kazuto learn to cope with his illness.

Kazuto’s timing couldn’t be better, since Special Actors is about to take on its toughest job yet. A young woman hires the agency to try to free her older sister from a fledgling Scientology-like cult, who are attempting to steal the older sister’s inn to use as their headquarters. It falls to the gang of actors to infiltrate the organization and concoct a scenario that will not only undo the innkeeper’s brainwashing, but expose the cult’s practices to the authorities. But hanging over the whole scheme is the question of Kazuto’s condition - will his lack of confidence and fainting ruin the operation?

The cult is run by a father-son duo who claim to receive instructions from an alien.

The movie delivers a series of slapstick scenes with increasingly frantic stakes, and it’s a lot of fun to watch the fictional acting troupe carrying out their plans. But despite how often the film focuses on Kazuto and his condition, the bare sketch of its origins makes it hard to sympathize with him. The screenplay pulls in two directions; it wants to make a sensitive comment about mental health as something you live with (and not cure), while also espousing the idea that conditions like Kazuto’s can be simply treated with a solid shock to the system.

For a movie where the characters must concoct twisty plans and subvert expectations, the character development is disappointingly thin. I kept expecting Kazuto or Hiroki to get hooked by the cult, creating tension in their relationship, but it never happens. The innkeeper, who Kazuto begins to fall for, isn’t filled in beyond being a mostly silent damsel in distress. Then the movie concludes with a reveal that riffs on David Fincher’s The Game, which is presented like a Shyamalan-style twist but is fairly predictable given the flow of the movie up to that point.

It’s also worth noting the big gap in production value between Special Actors and director Shin'ichirô Ueda’s breakout 2017 film, One Cut of the Dead. Both movies were made on scrappy budgets with unknown actors. But the visuals in Ueda’s zombie comedy are punchy and engaging, whereas Special Actors consists of harsh, flatly-lit compositions, which suggest a documentary-style production that doesn’t connect with the type of story being told.

Special Actors proves that the concept of hiring actors for bizarre real-life encounters is fertile ground for comedy. Unfortunately, Ueda’s characters and story aren’t deep enough to sustain the nearly 2-hour runtime, or to interrogate what it’s like to live out clients’ wishes in everyday life. Here’s hoping another filmmaker can take on the subject matter and find the mix of zaniness and drama that it deserves.

Special Actors gets two and a half stars out of four.