One Cut of the Dead: The Zombie Comedy With a Secret Structure

This is the hardest review I have had to structure, because the correct advice about One Cut of the Dead is to know nothing and the correct advice is also useless — you are reading a piece about it, so you already know there is something to know. The best I can offer is a promise and a rule. The promise: everything above the spoiler line is safe. The rule: if you have not seen it, read the first two sections, then stop, watch it, come back.

Here is what you need. It cost about three million yen, somewhere in the region of twenty thousand pounds. It was made by an acting workshop. It opened in Japan on two screens. It went on to gross somewhere north of a thousand times its budget. And the first thirty-seven minutes will make you think you have been sold a dud.

Stay in your seat. That is the whole review.

What you are allowed to know

Kamera o Tomeru na! — “Don’t Stop the Camera!” — was directed by Shin’ichirō Ueda in 2017. Ueda had made shorts. The cast came out of the ENBU Seminar, a Tokyo acting school, and the film was produced as a workshop project with the students as the company. Almost nobody in it had a screen credit worth the name. Takayuki Hamatsu, who carries the picture as a director named Higurashi, was a jobbing actor in his forties.

The film opens with a low-budget zombie movie being shot at an abandoned water-filtration plant, a real location with a real history that the script puts to use. The shoot goes wrong. Actual zombies turn up. And the whole of that opening — thirty-seven minutes of it — plays in a single unbroken take.

That is the marketing. That is on the poster. And the first-time viewer’s experience of those thirty-seven minutes is the most interesting thing about the film, because they are, by any conventional measure, bad. The performances are stiff. The blocking is odd. The camera bumps into things. There are pauses where nothing happens for an uncomfortably long time. An actor delivers a line and then simply stands there. The boom dips. Somebody’s eyeline is wrong.

I have now watched three different audiences sit through that opening and the pattern is identical every time: restlessness at ten minutes, resignation at twenty, and a specific kind of quiet at thirty — the quiet of a room that has decided it is watching a failure and is being polite about it.

Then the film ends. There are credits. It is thirty-seven minutes long and it is over.

Stay in your seat.

Why it works: the economics are the aesthetics

Set the structure aside — there is a craft argument here that survives on its own.

A twenty-thousand-pound feature has exactly one asset, which is time. Ueda has no money for coverage, no money for reshoots, no money for a name. What he has is a workshop full of actors who will rehearse for as long as he asks. So he spent the budget on rehearsal, which is the only line item in film-making that gets cheaper the more you use it.

The one-take opening was reportedly attempted a handful of times across a couple of days, with the whole company resetting the location and the blood and the choreography between each attempt. That is a brutal way to work and it is also the only way this film could exist. Every technical constraint — the single location, the tiny cast, the handheld camera, the practical gore — is a consequence of the money. Ueda’s genuine achievement is that he found a story in which each of those constraints is a plot point. The film is about the conditions of its own production, so the conditions stop being limitations and start being material.

Compare the arithmetic elsewhere. The Blair Witch Project did something structurally similar in 1999 — see our piece on what found footage cost and gave — by turning a lack of money into an aesthetic claim about authenticity. Ueda goes further. He turns the lack of money into a joke, an argument, and a plot, and then he makes the audience complicit in it.

The performances are the special effect

Hamatsu is remarkable and the film gives him no help. He plays a director of no distinction who has one attribute — he does not stop — and Hamatsu finds every register in that. Harumi Shuhama, as an actress with an unfortunate enthusiasm for self-defence training, gets the film’s biggest swings and lands them.

What makes the ensemble work is that these are workshop actors playing workshop actors. The performances of bad acting are, technically, extremely difficult — being convincingly stiff on camera while hitting exact marks in an unbroken take requires far more control than simply being good. The cast are doing the hardest version of their job while appearing to do the worst version, for thirty-seven consecutive minutes, and the audience’s contempt is the applause.

The collector’s cross-reference

The zombie material is deliberately generic. Ueda has no interest in adding to the canon — our zombie canon from Romero to now has nothing to learn from this film, and that is by design. The undead here are furniture.

The real ancestors are backstage comedies. Michael Frayn’s Noises Off is the master text: a farce that shows you a bad play, then takes you behind the set to watch the company destroy itself while performing it. Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion from 1995 is the film-set version, a picture about the specific agony of low-budget production. One Cut of the Dead is those traditions crossbred with the Japanese indie horror scene, and it is funnier than either.

The other lineage is the unbroken take as a stunt — Hitchcock hiding his cuts in Rope, Sokurov running the Hermitage in one breath in Russian Ark. Those films use the long take to assert mastery. Ueda uses it to expose fallibility, and that inversion is the film’s cleverest single idea.

Its closest Japanese cousin is Wild Zero in spirit — a film that understands zombies as a delivery mechanism for something the director actually cares about. For a zombie film built on complete sincerity instead, see Train to Busan.

The case against

The film has a rights problem. Ryoichi Wada, whose stage play Ghost in the Box! the production drew on, disputed the credit publicly, and the argument became a genuine controversy in Japan during the film’s success. The specifics were eventually settled between the parties, and it remains a fair thing to hold in mind about a film whose entire subject is the invisible labour of the people underneath a director’s name.

Critically, the honest objection is that the film is a single device. It is a machine built to deliver one experience, it delivers it perfectly, and it delivers it once. Rewatching is a genuinely different and lesser activity — pleasurable, admiring, and permanently deprived of the thing that made it extraordinary. The film’s greatness is partly an event, and events do not keep.

It is also, in a plain sense, not beautiful. The camerawork is rough, the grade is flat, and there is no shot in it you would frame.

The verdict

One Cut of the Dead is the most efficient conversion of no money into pure delight that this century has produced, and it is a genuinely moving film about why people make things badly and keep making them. It is on the streaming services, it has had a proper physical release, and it has generated a French remake and a small industry of imitators, none of which matter. Watch the original. Watch it with people. Do not let anyone check their phone at minute twenty-five.

Everything below this line will ruin it. I mean that literally.

Spoilers below

The credits at thirty-seven minutes are the trapdoor. What follows is a caption — one month earlier — and the film restarts as a workplace comedy about how that thirty-seven minutes got made.

Higurashi is hired by a channel to direct a live, one-take zombie broadcast. He is a hack with a catchphrase about being fast, cheap and average. He assembles a company of nightmares: a leading man who insists on method, an actress who cannot be touched, a producer who will not hear the word no, and a supporting player with a chronic bowel condition that the film sets up with the patience of a Swiss watchmaker. His wife is a former actress with a self-defence obsession and a tendency to stay in character for weeks. His daughter thinks he is a sell-out.

Then the film replays the thirty-seven minutes from behind the camera, and every single failure you sneered at is revealed to have a cause. The long pause was a drunk actor passed out. The bumped camera was a cameraman with a bad back. The odd blocking was a hasty repair for a car crash that took out two of the cast an hour before broadcast. The axe that misses is a wife improvising round a prop that broke. The film has been laying fair, visible clues for thirty-seven minutes and trusting you to mistake them for incompetence, which is the most generous con a director has ever run on an audience.

And it builds, gag by gag, to the human pyramid. The crane fails. The shot cannot be got. So the entire company — cast, crew, producer, the lot — physically stack themselves into a tower so the camera can rise for the final image. It is the funniest thing in the film and it is the thesis stated in one picture: a shot that looks like one person’s vision is thirty people holding each other up, out of frame, in pain.

Higurashi’s daughter operates the camera. His wife holds the base. The man who spent the whole film being told he was fast, cheap and average gets his shot because his family climbed on top of each other to give it to him.

I have never seen an audience make that noise. Every failure was love. Every mistake was somebody saving it. Ueda spends thirty-seven minutes teaching you to feel superior and then spends fifty minutes showing you exactly what you were laughing at. The correction arrives as an act of enormous affection for everyone who has ever worked on something that came out worse than they meant.

Pom!