Retribution 2006

Noboru Yoshioka, Koji Yakusho, is an experienced detective who probes the murder of an unknown woman in a red dress found drowned along the Tokyo waterfront. The autopsy reveals something unsettling: her stomach is full of seawater, and the physical clues seem to circle back to him. A button at the scene matches one missing from his own coat, and fingerprints are traced to his hands. Confronted with these anomalous connections, Yoshioka realizes—even if only for a moment—that he might be the prime suspect, yet his memory about the events is deeply fractured and incomplete.

A ghost in a red dress begins to haunt him, appearing with increasing intensity as a string of related killings unfolds. In each new crime, loved ones are murdered for seemingly minor infractions, and yet the killer always appears under the radar of Yoshioka’s investigations. As he follows the trail, he finds himself unravelling the pattern of the original murder, guiding him toward a truth that grows harder to grasp with every step. Throughout the pursuit, the line between the living and the dead blurs, and the investigation takes on a dreamlike, almost ritual rhythm.

The drowned woman is eventually identified, and Yoshioka visits her parents. In a twist that forces him to confront the motives and pressures acting behind the tragedy, he learns that she had a boyfriend who was extorting her family—and that this man arrives at the house during the same visit, quickly confessing to the crime. The case widens as the ghost’s presence intensifies, revealing new layers of guilt and memory.

The specter’s revelations complicate the case further: she is not the woman who was killed, but the ghost of a woman Yoshioka once glimpsed in the window of an asylum fifteen years ago. That woman has since died, and every killer in the present seems to have ridden the ferry past that same asylum. The awareness of this past horror drives Yoshioka to make drastic choices, even as he pushes a personal boundary too far. He sends away his girlfriend, Manami Konishi, anxious about what he might do next.

Driven by the ghost’s demand for forgiveness, Yoshioka travels to the old asylum. There, the woman in red — a figure tethered to his long-buried memory — offers forgiveness for his failure to help her all those years ago. Yet upon returning home, he makes a devastating discovery: he has already murdered his girlfriend, a truth that shatters his sense of self and pushes him further into madness. He begins to collect bones, a grim ritual that seems to bridge the living and the dead, and returns to the asylum in a desperate bid to reclaim the ghost’s bones.

The case takes a final, hallucinatory turn when his partner arrives at his apartment to find an empty bowl—the vessel Yoshioka used to commit the murder. The ghost lurks in the background as an earthquake rumbles, and the bowl fills with water. The ghost rises above him and drags them both into the growing pool, a merging of realms that signals the collapse of his fragile reality. The film closes on Yoshioka walking the street, carrying a bag that contains the bones of both his girlfriend and the ghost, while the specter’s chilling refrain echoes:

“I am dead. So please, I want everyone to die too”