Cold Fish

Plot

Nobuyuki Shamoto runs a small tropical fish shop in Shizuoka and endures a difficult home life with his rude, violent teenage daughter Mitsuko and his wife Taeko. He offers Mitsuko a job and proposes a business partnership with Nobuyuki. Taeko, after being raped by Yukio, becomes entranced and pressures Nobuyuki to accept.

Yukio and his wife Aiko are revealed to be sociopathic serial killers who use the fish business as a cover to scam, kill, and dispose of people. Yukio forces Nobuyuki to join them in dismembering and burning victims' corpses at a cabin. Nobuyuki grows increasingly afraid and loses his sense of right and wrong.

During a trip to dispose of body parts, Yukio humiliates Nobuyuki and reveals he slept with Taeko. Nobuyuki stabs Yukio to death with a ballpoint pen. Aiko is stabbed in the neck but survives and develops a twisted devotion to Nobuyuki, who then instructs her to dismember Yukio's corpse.

Reception

Film Business Asia rated Cold Fish 8/10, praising Denden's performance as essential to the film and describing it as a danse macabre about social breakdown rather than a straightforward gore horror. Total Film gave it 3/5, noting that dark comedy and plot twists offered relief from hysterical acting and rivers of viscera. The Guardian found the film fairly ordinary compared to Sono's other works and too long. Radio Times gave 3/5, commending the acting and the cinematography by Shinya Kimura and production design by Takashi Matsuzuka.