BEFORE WE VANISH

Arrow Video, £22.99 (Blu-ray)

Aliens that steal concepts arrive on Earth ahead of a full-scale invasion in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s intermittently affecting film. A girl (Akira) returns home bearing a goldfish and proceeds to murder her family, then gleefully causes a road accident, while graphic designer Narumi’s husband Shinzy is behaving very strangely. Journalist Sakurai, investigating ‘something big’, is drawn to the family’s murder, and encounters a third oddball (Amano) looking to meet the missing girl. Amano explains to Sakurai that the three are in fact body-borrowing aliens who are collecting concepts, plucking them out of people’s heads. The scenes where this theft occurs are incredibly powerful. How do you explain ideas of marriage, possession or self to an alien? What happens to us if we lose our sense of them? “Do you know the meaning of freedom?” asks a human character “I do,” replies an alien. “I took it.” Before We Vanish is frequently brutal and disturbing, but played mostly for uneasy laughs, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the tone of Meet the Applegates. The three aliens veer between being loveably wacky and genuinely chilling, particularly Yuri Tsunematsu’s amoral Akira. There are shades of Romero’s The Crazies as society begins to fall apart, with those touched by the aliens losing their inhibitions as they are freed from the ideas which bind us, but ultimately it pulls its punch in offering an upbeat climax. While this suits the lightness of the rest of the film, it does make it far less memorable than the bleak climax of Kurosawa’s Pulse, which carries its shared theme of emotional vampirism to an altogether more disturbing end. Martin Parsons ★★★★★