Akunin

Akunin ("Villain") is a 2010 Japanese film about a murderer and the ordinary young woman who loves him. Shimizu (the titular "villain") is a troubled young man with a difficult home life; when Yoshino, the girl he's in love with, blows off an appointment with him to go off with the richer and prettier Masuo, he follows them and kills her. As he's going on with his daily life, trying to avoid suspicion, he receives an e-mail from a desperately lonely woman, Mitsuyo, who found him through a dating site. The two arrange to meet and soon strike up a romantic relationship -- if not a very healthy one. And then the police come looking for Shimizu...

Not to be confused with Boris Akunin.


 * All Girls Want Bad Boys -- Yoshino dated Shimizu and ditched him for Masuo, who is, if anything, an even bigger jerk. Then there's Mitsuyo.
 * Bathroom Break Out -- Performed by Mitsuyo when.
 * Crazy Jealous Guy -- Shimizu, obviously.
 * Delinquent Hair -- Shimizu's is dyed blonde, and at one point Mitsuyo says she never expected she'd go out with "a blond guy like [him]", making "blond guy" sound like a euphemism for "bad boy".
 * Happier Home Movie -- During Yoshino's funeral, her father is seen in another room, away from everyone else, watching home movies of her childhood.
 * Letting Her Hair Down -- Mitsuyo wears her hair in a tight pontytail at first, and lets it down when . After she puts it up again.
 * Lighthouse Point -- Shimizu and Mitsuyo take up residence in an abandoned lighthouse for a while.
 * Love Martyr -- Mitsuyo, who puts up with Shimizu's violent behavior and even tries to convince her worried sister that he's "not such a bad person" after he's more or less kidnapped her and confessed to being a murderer.
 * Modesty Bedsheet -- A textbook example of the "apparently L-shaped sheet" variety after Shimizu and Mitsuyo have sex for the first time.
 * One-Woman Wail -- During the climactic scene in the lighthouse.
 * Parental Abandonment -- When Shimizu was very young, his mother took him to a lighthouse, told him to wait there for her, and then just up and vanished. May be a Freudian Excuse for Shimizu's issues with women.
 * Quieter Than Silence -- The movie has very little background music and a number of dialogue-free scenes or scenes where the sound is muffled because the "viewpoint character" is watching from, e.g., inside a car. It's unsettling, and the tendency for these quiet scenes to be interrupted by sudden loud noises doesn't help.