Tokyo Ghoul ★★★

JAPANESE horror thriller Tokyo Ghoul brings a popular manga comic to the big screen.

As a live action treatment it looks suitably dark and stylish and has a strong energy.

While it’s a familiar story in this universe, it is considerably lifted by the performances of the young cast, particularly relative newcomer Masataka Kubota in the lead role.

Starting the film as a bookish and socially awkward student, he is convincing throughout his character’s final transformation into a determined avenger.

This is director Kentaro Hagiwara’s first feature film and the script is by the creator of the original story, Sui Ishida. It has previously been a video short and a television series.

Hogiwara studied Ishida’s drawings to translate their visual style to live-action and, while I’m no manga expert, he seems to have done a solid job, particularly with the physical manifestations of each ghoul.

It also uses a series of interesting locations on the back streets of Tokyo, such as floodways, canal banks and car parks, that are not often seen.

Tokyo Ghoul is set in an alternate fantasy reality alongside normal society. Ghouls, creatures that look human but have superhuman strength and can only survive by eating human flesh, live in secret to evade pursuit from the authorities.

Before you yell ‘Harry Potter’, I would wager this form of tale has been around the manga and anime worlds for a considerably longer period.

This film represents a much darker descent into this type of world, with many of the ghouls struggling to understand their place and the painful transformations they must undergo.

Kubota plays Ken, a normal college student who is viciously attacked by a ghoul. He avoids death but has organ damage requiring transplants. Inexplicably, the hospital chooses the nearest, recent dead body for the donations, which turns out to be the ghoul that attacked him in the first place.

As a result, Ken winds up a human/ghoul hybrid, making it doubly difficult for him to transfer into another physical state and find acceptance from the secret society.

At the same time the group he becomes attached to is under surveillance by a special government counter-Ghoul squad intent on eradicating them using new weaponry, resulting in a final extended showdown.

It’s all basic, standard stuff, but executed with sufficient style and commitment to suggest futures for the director and his star.