Dir: Koto Nagata. Japan. 2025. 131 minutes

A pair of young swindlers and their mentor plot to escape their lives of petty crime; lives spent posing as women on social media platforms, finding lonely, vulnerable men and sweet-talking them into selling their valuable identities. Pulling off such a heist turns out to be easier said than done in Koto Nagata’s Baka’s Identity, a low-key Japanese crime thriller pivoting on the country’s reverence for the seamless marriage of personal identity and order, and its emerging cycles of poverty and crime among younger generations.

Built on a slow-burning tension 

Beginning her career as assistant director on Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001), film and television director Nagata cut her teeth on emotional storytelling and gives Baka’s Identity an intimate tone that should help it travel following its world premiere in Busan’s new Competition section. Producer Akira Morii collaborated with the film’s stars Takumi Kitamura (Tokyo Revengers) and Go Ayano (Love Exposure, Rage) on 2023 Netflix science fiction yokai adventure series Yu Yu Hakusho, which could give the film a higher profile in Asia Pacific and earn it an arthouse release in the region. It opens in Japan on October 24.

Baka’s Identity is built on a slow-burning tension reminiscent of Masato Harada’s Bad Lands, in which we’re asked to empathise with a motley clutch of lowlifes and petty grifters who find themselves at dead ends – often through no fault of their own. The film unfurls over three days, spread over a three-chapter structure and told from three different POVs, with a piece being added to the puzzle each time.

Chapter one starts with orange-haired Mamoru (Yuta Hayashi, Happyend), hanging out at home on a sweltering afternoon, juggling a collection of mobile phones that he uses to play honeytrap. Eventually the older, wiser Takuya (Kitamura) shows him how to lure unwitting men, and they head off to see the two marks at the heart of the saga; one a flat broke man willing to sell his spotless identity to dodge his debts, the other bereft at the death of a child.

The second chapter then goes back in time to follow Takuya as he first meets Mamuro at a shady dormitory for the unhoused. We learn how he mastered the ID grift from veteran Kajitani (Ayano), who Takuya later turns to when he decides he’s had enough. The picture is finally completed with chapter three and a focus on Kajitani, his mentorship of Takuya and their flight from the underworld.

When things finally come to a head, it’s messy and unglamorous as opposed to choreographed and acrobatic. Baka’s Identity is distinguished by Nagata and Mukai’s unwavering attention to the humanity of the central trio, however flawed it may be. Takuya is not a monster, and feels guilt over his criminal activities. The same can be said of Kajitani, who forges an against-all-odds connection with club waitress Yuika and unwisely throws his lot in with Takuya, recognising his culpability in his predicament.