The City of Lost Souls

I just finished The City of Lost Souls and it’s one of Takashi Miike’s wildest gangster films. The story follows Mario, a Japanese-Brazilian guy who steals a helicopter to rescue his girlfriend Kei from an immigration center. They plan to escape Japan but end up stealing a suitcase full of cocaine that belongs to both the yakuza and a Chinese triad. Now everyone’s hunting them down while they try to sell the drugs and survive.

This sounds like a typical lovers-on-the-run movie, but Miike fills it with the most bizarre stuff. There are CGI chicken fights, a deadly ping pong match, people using cocaine as toothpaste, and characters who appear out of nowhere. The movie jumps around constantly, changing tone every few minutes. Sometimes it feels like a parody of gangster films, other times it gets genuinely emotional. It’s messy but that chaos keeps things interesting.

What I found most compelling is how Miike focuses on outsiders. Most characters are foreigners in Japan, people who don’t really belong anywhere. Mario and Kei dream of escaping, but the film suggests they’ll never find peace no matter where they go. It’s about loneliness and identity underneath all the action and weirdness.

The performances work well enough. Teah plays Mario with a mix of toughness and sadness, while Michelle Reis brings cool energy as Kei. They don’t have amazing chemistry but they capture that feeling of a couple running on pure desperation. Visually, Miike keeps everything moving with quick cuts and odd camera angles that make even quiet scenes feel alive.

I’ll admit the film has problems. Too many characters, some jokes drag on forever, and the constant tone shifts can feel more confusing than clever. It borrows heavily from films like True Romance and sometimes feels like Miike showing off rather than telling a story. But even when it’s frustrating, it’s never boring. This is Miike at his most experimental, mixing beauty with trash in the most chaotic way possible.