Genre Comedy

One Cut of the Dead (2017)

Item: One Cut of the Dead
Rating: 0.5
Author: Ross McLaren

½ — One Cut of the Dead (2017)

There is a particular kind of low-budget film that arrives with a reputation so outsized it can almost crush the viewing experience before the opening frame. Moshari, another horror film reviewed on this site, operates on a similarly stripped-back scale, but One Cut of the Dead is a different creature altogether: a Japanese horror-comedy that became one of the most talked-about genre films of its era, racking up festival buzz and word-of-mouth enthusiasm that spread well beyond its modest origins. Made in Japan in 2017 and running to 96 minutes, the film was produced by Panpokopina and ENBU Seminar, the latter being a Tokyo acting school whose students formed the bulk of the cast and crew. That context is worth holding onto. This is, in every practical sense, a student production, shot on an extremely tight budget in an abandoned warehouse, and its tagline ("Don't Stop Shooting!") gives a reasonable hint at the formal conceit the film is built around.

Writer and director Shinichiro Ueda was a relatively unknown filmmaker at the time, and One Cut of the Dead served as his breakthrough feature. The premise, at least as it is presented, drops a film crew shooting a low-rent zombie picture into a situation where the dead begin rising for real, turning the production into something considerably more chaotic than the director bargained for. The film's formal hook is a sustained single-take sequence that opens proceedings, and it is that sequence, along with the structural games Ueda plays around it, that generated so much critical enthusiasm. Whether that enthusiasm is warranted is, of course, precisely the question. The principal cast includes Takayuki Hamatsu as the beleaguered director at the centre of the chaos, alongside Yuzuki Akiyama, Harumi Shuhama, Mao, and Kazuaki Nagaya. None of them were household names coming in, which was rather the point: the film wears its roughness on its sleeve, presenting performances and production values that are, to put it diplomatically, deliberately difficult to evaluate at face value.

The film sits in an interesting, if crowded, tradition of meta-fictional horror and behind-the-scenes comedy, playing with the mechanics of filmmaking itself as a source of both dread and farce. For anyone who has spent time with Japanese cinema more broadly, from the ghostly atmosphere of The Snow Woman to the more recent animated work covered in reviews of Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain and Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II, The Ashes of Rage, the national cinema has always had a broad and restless range. One Cut of the Dead positions itself at the scrappier, more anarchic end of that spectrum. Whether it pulls off what it is attempting, or whether the whole enterprise is rather less clever than its admirers insist, is the central question. Over to Macca.

One Cut of the Dead (2018) is widely praised as a clever, meta, low-budget triumph, but for me, it’s an insufferable mess that doesn’t earn its acclaim. The film opens with what seems like a single 37-minute continuous zombie take (clumsy camerawork, terrible acting, chaotic direction) and I sat through it thinking: "This must be intentional satire" and even other reviews said "don't worry, it takes a while but it comes good" but then comes the twist: it’s not real zombies attacking a crew (as the premise states); it’s just a film-within-a-film, and the rest of the movie becomes a behind-the-scenes look at how this awful production came together. Here’s the problem: the premise is misleading. Audiences are sold on the idea of a film crew being attacked by 'real' zombies during a live shoot, a wild, high-concept horror-comedy hook. But that never happens. It’s all fake, staged, and retroactively explained as a poorly made indie film. So the “twist” isn’t thrilling or profound, it’s a bait-and-switch. Instead of escalating tension, we get improv comedy, slapstick bickering, and forced quirkiness disguised as charm. The first act is gruelling to sit through if you think you’re watching something genuinely out of control. And the second half justifies nothing. The acting remains wooden, the writing flat, and the much-lauded “meta” structure feels more like an excuse for amateurish filmmaking than a bold artistic choice. It’s ambitious, but it fails on almost every level while pretending to be genius. Call it experimental if you want. I call it tedious, dishonest, and one of the most overrated films in recent memory. Absolutely awful.

I want to be fair to the film's defenders, because I do understand the appeal of the concept on paper. A micro-budget production folding its own limitations into the joke, turning amateurism into the punchline, is a genuinely promising idea. But for me, a promising idea is not the same as a satisfying film, and there is a difference between structural cleverness and structural honesty. When the scaffolding is all you are left admiring, something has gone wrong. If you are curious about films from the 2010s that use unconventional filmmaking choices to more purposeful effect, Hardcore Henry is one I have covered here that at least commits to its formal experiment without the sense of a safety net underneath it. As for One Cut of the Dead, the reputation preceded it by some distance. The film itself, I am afraid, did not keep pace.

Rating: ½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2025-09-27

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for One Cut of the Dead (2017) on YouTube

Where to watch

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