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“My interest in nightmares comes from my childhood. The most horrible thing for me, then, was falling asleep, because suddenly I would descend into dreams which frightened me”. As Shinya Tsukamoto himself explains in an interview, the inspiration for Nightmare Detective [Akumu Tantei, ] came from the ghosts which have haunted him since his childhood. It is not surprising that he has become one of the most gifted directors when it comes to depicting the world of dreams, and that he has chosen Cronenberg and Lynch as his mentors. Even though he is not extremely well known, Tsukamoto is one of the most talented auteurs of contemporary Japanese cinema and he has already won numerous prizes for his work, among these, the Special Jury Prize for Snake of June at the Venice Film Festival.
The key theme that emerges from the director's poetic world is human alienation which arises when trauma leaves its mark on the developing human subject. In order to explore this sadness, which we can also observe every day in our consulting rooms, Tsukamoto makes use of the fictional world of cyberpunk. This genre, inaugurated by Blade Runner , imagines a future age dominated by computers in which humans have been enslaved by machines. This is the new society of cyborgs in which, just as science (fiction) promises, minds have become transferable as though they were files. New technologies live parasitically on the body and shape it in their own image. Devices that are ever more invasive, or, in fact, ‘engulfing’ of the body, deprive the individual and society of their humanity. The boundaries between human and non-human have shifted.
By developing the central metaphor of the man-machine to address the topic of dehumanization, Nightmare Detective is also a meditation on modern civilization and its discontents. By portraying the culture of the so-called post/transhuman in a harsh light, Tsukamoto shows us how subjectivity is being redefined. In essence, he is returning to the poetic world of