Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan: At A Confessional

Let’s wrap up this month the same way it started—on Amazon Prime. And - what do you know? - it's a live-action movie based on a manga! It's a reversal of the last review, I know! Let's get to it.

Today's subject is Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan: At A Confessional, based on Hirohiko Araki's spin-off of his magnum opus, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Before it became a long-running TV anime, the main manga was adapted into a direct-to-video series, a few video games, and an anime movie that disappeared once it left theatres in 2007! This spin-off, meanwhile, became a live action show a few years ago, and this is its second movie.

Like the show, this movie pretty much divorces itself from any Jojo lore. You don't need to know anything about the main franchise going in, but I'll still fill you in. Our hero, going by western name order, is Rohan Kishibe (Issey Takahashi), a supporting character introduced in the fourth arc, Diamond is Unbreakable. He's a manga artist who can turn people's faces into open books and even rewrite their personalities, all with the command "Heaven's Door!" In the manga, this is attributed to his "Stand," a personified fighting spirit practically everybody has. Here, there's no explanation, except for maybe an innate peculiarity of his. It's still understandable, though.

This time, Rohan is in Venice to speak at a cultural event. He's even ahead of schedule, much to his beleaguered editor Kyoka Izumi's (Marie Iitoyo) dismay. While hanging around a church, Rohan accidentally takes confession from a masked man, which forms the bulk of the movie. As a young man, the stranger indirectly killed two men - a homeless guy named Sotoba (Shigeyuki Totsugi) and his own assistant. His victims now haunt him as vengeful ghosts, who curse him with lucky streaks that end in tragedy. The curse even extends to the man's daughter, Maria (Tina Tamashiro), who is about to marry a rich guy named Lorenzo Grimani (Andrea Bellacicco). The curse rubs off on Rohan, so he decides to rewrite this ghost story.

How about we start with the positives? For starters, Takahashi's performance nails Rohan's eccentric sassiness. In his first scene, he gets really defensive when two guys accidentally belittle his profession. It's just his luck, perhaps, that they turn out to also be pickpockets. He's an oddball, but he's still a good man, which he proves by getting involved with the masked man (I'm neglecting to name his actor because of spoilers). His protestations, like "I don't create works to hang them in museums" is pretty ironic considering Araki's manga artwork has featured in museum exhibits, even in the Louvre!

He's got a pretty good supporting cast. Kyoka, meanwhile, is pretty likable, especially as she tries to cope with his eccentricities. Her buoyant chemistry with Rohan makes perfect sense once you realize Takahashi and Iitoyo got married last year! Maria, meanwhile, is quite sympathetic, while Lorenzo's admiration for Rohan is quite infectious. It's quite a relief that Maria doesn't fall for her father framing Lorenzo for cheating. The climax sees our heroes, save Kyoka, use a pretty ingenious scheme to save Maria from the curse.

Now for a few others. We've got some good location filming by cinematographers Shigeru Tajima and Shuhei Yamamoto. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it's still appealing, nonetheless. There's something nifty makeup work involved with Rohan's open-book powers, as well as the two ghosts. The ghostly villains are perfectly sinister, as is their victim when he's overcome with madness. A scene where Sotoba possesses a young Maria to humiliate her dad is very disturbing and overlong, though it's alleviated somewhat by the old man's overacting. I was quite impressed with the various twists in the old man's story. 

The only thing I truly hated about the movie is the score by Naruyoshi Kikuchi, who scored the live-action show. Kikuchi composed it with generative AI, which is apparently the first soundtrack to do so. Once you hear it, you'll pray it's the only one. I can infer he was trying to accentuate the creepiness, but his soundtrack is mostly an a-tonal mess. The score during Maria's possession made that scene more unbearable than director Kazutaka Watanabe intended to. Thankfully, we get a few scenes where the soundtrack isn't that painful or overly bizarre, and those especially stand out. One of them highlights the opera Rigoletto, which is thematically important to the plot.

If not for the score, then Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan: At A Confessional would make a good starting point into its main franchise. If you're able to tune it out, then all the power to you. Otherwise, I can recommend you partake in pretty much anything else. Did you know that Araki's original manga spin-off has its own anime? You can try that! I think I said enough.