Selection Review

BIFF SALON

'BAKA's  Identity' review

By CINE 21 - Lee Woobeen

The film is, at its heart, a story about care. On the surface, however, it hardly seems that way. Superficially, it resembles a Japanese-style youth action drama, combining the traits of coming-of-age stories with the conventions of a typical crime film. The protagonists—Takuya, Mamoru, and Kajitani—belong to a Tokyo-based criminal organization. Takuya and Mamoru operate within a violent network engaged in everything from romance scams on social media and identity fraud to murder and organ trafficking. To Mamoru, who seems barely twenty, Takuya is like an older brother. Yet their bond does not hinge on the masculine codes of loyalty or honor that often underpin organized crime syndicates in Hong Kong noir. Instead, they share meals, their nights and mornings, functioning, quite literally, as a family. One day, however, Takuya disappears, and Mamoru inadvertently earns the organization’s ire, finding himself in a bizarre predicament. It gradually emerges that Takuya has been involved in some incident concerning the boss’s money. If Takuya is Mamoru’s brother, then Kajitani is Takuya’s. Kajitani, the one who took in the young Takuya, is the only senior figure whom Takuya can genuinely trust. The film unfolds the story of Takuya, Mamoru, and Kajitani in three acts, employing a multi-perspective structure that evokes Rashomon and, more recently, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Monster. Unlike many films that use a tripartite framework to shuffle the truth of events or confuse timelines to heighten mystery, BAKA’s Identity instead uses it as an emotional scaffold to explore how these three men care for one another. The intersecting perspectives illustrate how each character, having drawn the others into his own world, fulfills the responsibility of that connection. Though it may appear to be a genre piece wildly extending along paternal lines, the film is closer to a drama attentively observing the boys’ curling up and stretching, as a stand-in for absent maternal guidance. Compared to recent Japanese films depicting youth, BAKA’s Identity diverges from the painterly focus on the youth’s listlessness and sense of weightlessness seen in Yuya Ishii’s The Tokyo Night Sky is Always the Densest Shade of Blue or Sho Miyake’s And Your Bird Can Sing. Nor does it adopt the fleeting observational lens that captures the fractures of adolescence, as in Neo Sora’s Happyend. Rather, it aligns more with directors like Naomi Kawase and Hirokazu Koreeda, embracing the growth and mutual care of children cast defenseless into social crime and inevitable tragedy. Such a delicate emotional touch may reflect the film’s director, Nagata Koto’s career, which includes directing multiple melodrama series and serving as Shunji Iwai’s assistant director. 

BNK부산은행
제네시스
한국수력원자력㈜
뉴트리라이트
두산에너빌리티
OB맥주 (한맥)
네이버
파라다이스 호텔 부산
한국거래소
드비치골프클럽 주식회사
Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism
Busan Metropolitan City
Korean Film Council
BUSAN CINEMA CENTER
2025 BIFF 로고
Busan Office 3rd Floor, BIFF HILL, Busan Cinema Center, 120, Suyeonggangbyeon-daero, Haeundae-gu, Busan 48058, Korea Seoul Office #1601, GARDEN TOWER, 84, Yulgok-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul 03131, Korea