Cold Fish

Nobuyuki Shamoto runs a modest shop selling tropical fish, getting by on a quiet, unremarkable routine. His second wife, Taeko, and his teenage daughter from an earlier marriage, Mitsuko, do not get along, and the tension at home weighs on him. When Mitsuko is caught shoplifting at a store, a stranger named Yukio Murata steps in and smooths things over with the manager. Murata runs a much larger fish business of his own, and he soon draws Shamoto into a friendship, even taking Mitsuko in to work and live at his house. Behind the older man's warm manner, however, lies something far darker, and Shamoto is pulled into it step by step.

Sion Sono directed and co-wrote the film with Yoshiki Takahashi. It was released in 2011 and stands eighth among the nineteen features he has directed, arriving between Love Exposure and Guilty of Romance. Mitsuru Fukikoshi plays Shamoto and Denden plays Murata, with Asuka Kurosawa, Megumi Kagurazaka, Hikari Kajiwara and Tetsu Watanabe in supporting roles.

The film runs 146 minutes and blends crime, drama, horror and thriller elements. On IMDb it holds a 7.1 rating from roughly 16,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.9 from about 420 votes, a narrower but similar audience response. A critics' rating of 6.3 from 24 reviews places it somewhat below those viewer scores.