Cold Fish

‘I hope you like cold fish’ is probably the sexiest thing I’ll ever hear a French girl say.


Completely out of context, ‘Cold Fish’ is the latest work of ‘Love Exposure’ director, Sion Sono. Being that it is over four hours long – and not even I can be arsed to sit through a film for that long – I have never seen ‘Love Exposure’, and so this was my first experience of Sono‘s work.

The old ‘based on a true story’, then grossly exaggerated for cinema premise, we see boring, dull, pet fish shop owner, Shamoto and his family’s lives turned upside down when the big and brash, tropical fish shop owner, Murata walks into them.


What follows is a pretty standard offering, with violence, blood and sex thrown in for ‘shocks’, and it’s all pretty entertaining, in a popcorn-movie kind of a way. Despite being another long film, it rarely drags, with some nice camerawork to contrast industrial Japan in the shadow of Fuji-san.


There are attempts to add the odd psychological element here and there, though these never get too deep, as ‘Cold Fish’ plods along its dirty, sexy, bloody way. Don’t search for any hidden meanings here; there’s; little fishy about this one.