Yen Town

Some films just hit. Yen Town is about this girl Ageha whose mother dies, and she gets raised by a Chinese singer named Glico and introduced to this world called Yen Town where everything’s for sale—sex, power, money. They find cash in a corpse, and suddenly this weird crew of Japanese, Chinese, and American people are rich. They buy a nightclub, Glico becomes a star, and everyone else slides into greed and crime and eventually gets hunted down by killers. It’s the whole trajectory: you want something, you get it, it kills you.

What I loved was how it refuses to look away. Japanese cinema that doesn’t add false depth or redemption narratives, just shows you what happens when people want something badly enough. Dirty. Real. That’s the film.