Ride or Die review: Netflix’s import turns a manga into a sexy queer love story

Few issues really feel as lazy as a tidy movie. When all of the free ends fall gracefully into place, and never a single plotline is left dangling, a narrative can really feel too engineered to be actual. Folks aren’t neat and tidy creatures: We do issues that make no sense. We imagine lies, and provides in to unrequited love. However even when a film’s story is completely fabricated, the feelings must really feel actual to attach with the viewers. We’d like the type of mess that comes with precise relationships. The Netflix Japanese import Experience or Die is all about being messy. The feelings are messy, the getaway is messy. And the gallons of blood are messy too.

Directed by Ryuichi Hiroki, Experience or Die was tailored for the display from Nakamura Ching’s manga collection Gunjo. Within the custom of yuri manga tales, it focuses on a same-sex relationship, although this one’s much more difficult than a schoolgirl crush or a simple hookup.

Rei (Kiko Mizuhara) is launched on her method right into a cavernous underground nightclub. After doing a lap across the bar, in a single handheld take, she units her sights on a person who’s sitting alone. It’s unclear what attracts her to him specifically, however she will get his consideration by shopping for him a drink, and shortly, they’re in a cab collectively, and he or she’s gently pushing for him to take her dwelling.

Their sexual rendezvous progresses rapidly, and ends simply as abruptly as they begin. Rei maneuvers to get on high of him, and retains driving him whereas she reaches for a scalpel. Although he fights again, she slashes his throat and stabs him with a damaged wine glass, killing him swiftly. She’s bare, coated in blood, and in full shock. What may compel her to do such a factor? Experience or Die spends the remainder of the movie answering that query.

Photograph: Aiko Nakano / Netflix

The reply includes Rei’s high-school crush, Nanae (Honami Satô), and the lengthy, difficult relationship between the 2 ladies, which begins again up after the person is useless. Rei and Nanae hit the highway in Nanae’s convertible, and as they ponder their future, they dive into their recollections. Not like the leads in Thelma & Louise, they don’t have a present relationship after they go on the run. When Nanae re-emerges in Rei’s life, it’s as if Rei’s seen a ghost. She had a contented life, with a tipsy, charming girlfriend, and a profitable profession as a plastic surgeon. However she’s keen to present all of it up after only a single cellphone name from her previous.

Experience or Die does an distinctive job of exhibiting that Rei and Nanae’s previous problems aren’t so simple as school-girl crushes or encounters with mean-girl cliques. They’re attracted to one another, however the gulf between them is steeped in homophobia (each internalized and cultural) and considerably, their class variations. Nanae grew up poor in an abusive home, and the cycles of abuse and monetary battle are by no means remoted from her present issues. She’s as a lot a product of her upbringing as Rei is the product of her prosperous childhood.

In the end, these variations at school and sexual orientation are variations in energy, and that ever-shifting dynamic isn’t misplaced on Rei and Nanae. Their points aren’t so simple as “Who has cash?” or “Who’s most accepted in our society?” They’re extra in regards to the questions of what that cash or acceptance means to every of them, and the way they will use that gravity to govern each other. They got here from the identical city, however they’re worlds aside in understanding what makes the opposite tick.

This push and pull between the ladies is amplified as they’re on the run from the killing. Some vehicular hiccups make their journey extra Planes, Trains & Cars than Mad Max as they change from convertible to scooter to coach to SUV. Alongside the way in which, their feelings appear to shift gears as incessantly as their transportation, however that appears to be anticipated, if not supposed by these two. The chaos is of their very own design, and so they lean into it. The near-manic soundtrack, which layers pop songs like The Cardigans’ “Love Idiot” over fleeing a homicide website simply add to the tonal and emotional disruption.

Past the demise and geysers of blood, the opposite main attention-attracting ingredient of Experience or Die is the brazen nudity. Each of the ladies strip all the way down to nothing a number of occasions within the movie. Generally it’s for intercourse, typically for a bathe, however all of the flesh onscreen retailers in need of feeling exploitative. The nudity is used as a strategy to present vulnerability and honesty. Listed here are two ladies who play video games with themselves and one another, however they incessantly find yourself in states the place they will’t disguise from one another. Hiroki makes Experience or Die attractive when he needs it to be, he simply understands that not all nudity is supposed to be attractive.

Photograph: Aiko Nakano / Netflix

Whereas it might sound unfathomable to want for a 142-minute movie to be longer, it nonetheless seems like Experience or Die depends on an terrible lot of shorthand to get all the way down to that run time. Brief encounters with Rei’s household and strangers alongside the journey level to a good deeper story that’s barely explored on this function. A fair leaner edit may have eradicated any potential distractions, however given its model with nuance and complication, the even deeper dive into this world appears extra interesting than the minimalist model. Experience or Die strikes some unusual tones, and options some questionable motives. However that simply helps the world Rei and Nanae have crafted for themselves. It’s messy and imperfect, and in that method, it feels unnervingly actual.

Experience or Die is streaming on Netflix now.