Wen 丨 Yellow Millet
The just-concluded five-episode Japanese drama "Influence" was originally the best of the winter Japanese dramas, the plot was familiar with the strange, the character relationship was streamlined but unexpected, until the disappointing final episode.
The problem with "Impact" is that it fails to take full advantage of the signals cast by the first four episodes, choosing to take the warm route to avoid deeper exploration of human nature, so that people suspect that the previous so-called clues are not the product of comprehensive thinking at all.
The Impact (2021)
"Influence" quickly begins with two monologues, and the pop novelist played by Nanami Suzuki receives a letter from a reader to tell her the story of herself and her friend, and the narrator is the novelist's contemporary Yuri, who tells the novelist's unexpected life experience: a series of murder stories that she and two friends have been bonded for a lifetime.
Yuri stabbed someone with a knife in order to save her friend Makoto from the wolf in high school, but she did not expect to be seen by her childhood friend Riko, who not only mended the knife afterwards, but also surrendered herself.
In the first episode, Yuri's self-description ends here, but what is even more shocking is that the novelist returns home to find that from her psychological activity narration, we know that the novelist was also enrolled in the high school of three friends, and they were classmates of the same grade.
This casts doubt on Yuri's motives for coming to her to tell a story. The novelist's task as a fiction expert is to discern the authenticity of a story, and Yuri's insistence that she write the story makes people more suspicious of the possible connection between the three friends and the novelist.
Most confessional suspense stories allow the audience to understand the event from the perspective of the main narrator, and can quickly build a sense of trust, allowing the audience to accept the content of the story as a fact without defense. And "Impact" because of the perspective of this novelist, can't help but expect that the truth of this story will be more unexpected.
As the series progresses, the three protagonists in Yuri's story and the complex relationship between them that have lasted for more than thirty years gradually come to light. Riko uses the satyr killing case as a weight and demands that Yuri kill her grandfather, who continues to sexually assault her.
Yuri's first action was unsuccessful, and Makoto, who learned of this, chose to kill Riko's grandfather on his own behalf in order to make Yuri pay off Riko's "love debt" smoothly and not have to take the risk again. This makes the relationship between the three people delicate.
There are many stories of exchanging killings to create an alibi, and Hitchcock's debut novel "Train Freak", which was greatly changed by Hitchcock, is a more classic example. But the trio in "Impact" is not strangers in the first place, and one suspect and the other two will soon be interrogated. Moreover, Zhenfan and Yuri did not have a target to get rid of, and they killed people out of righteousness.
As for silently guarding each other, there are many stories of committing crimes for each other, such as Minami Kanae's "For N" and Keigo Higashino's "White Night". But the three-person relationship in "Impact" is obviously not like this. Yuri is more like a victim of emotional blackmail and moral kidnapping in the name of friendship.
She stabs the satyr in self-defense, and is accused of self-talk by the long-estranged Riko, after which she wants to turn herself in, but is stopped by Zhenfan, saying that it is because she is afraid of damage to her reputation. Zhenfan helped Lizi kill her grandfather instead of her, and it was not without asking for anything in return, and Zhenfan, who suddenly visited with her daughter a few years later, asked Youli to help her kill her domestic violence husband and help her get out of the sea of suffering.
Although all three believed that there was a strong fatalistic connection between them, it was so strong that they would never see each other again in this life if they were not necessary. But from the facts, Youli's psychological trauma seems to be the greatest, she can't make friends and fall in love normally, and she can't even take a knife and cut vegetables. Just when Yuri thought that the three of them would no longer have to be entangled, she found that she was not killing Zhenfan's so-called domestic violence husband, and she didn't even know who the person she killed was.
At this time, the novelist began to investigate the background of Yuri, and even went to the dilapidated community where the three lived when they were teenagers. Yuri did not refuse to come to visit her, which once made people worry about her safety. Yuri once again insisted that she publish the story and asked if she could get a certain amount of material to provide remuneration, and the novelist asked Aboutori's current situation, but the other party refused to tell her immediately, wanting to finish the story at his own pace.
From the novelist's cautious eyes, she may be more concerned about how the criminal past of these three alumni has to do with herself. As an audience, I would have expected fictionalists to have the opportunity to use their professional skills and hear the flaws in the story. But before the finale, although she found out that the narrator was not Yuri, and the real Yuri had died, she did not question whether the story itself was reliable.
Before the finale, Yuri, who kills again in the story, discovers that she has killed Riko's husband, who was not as happy as she said before, but after her husband's death, she is able to renew her relationship with her high school lover. And Zhenfan not only deceived Youli, but also happened to be able to get rid of the nail household and profit from it.
Yuri thinks that the relationship between the three of them is centered on himself, and the other two have almost no intersection. This is clearly not the case. Zhenfan's explanation for this is that he was blackmailed by Riko, but because he had a motive to kill, he had to deceive Yuri, which was about the same as admitting that the reason for killing people with a knife quickly persuaded Yuri.
The reason why "before the finale" is mentioned repeatedly is because the first four episodes are almost the essence of the show, and although the following has important spoilers, it has little significance. Everyone in the audience must have their own guesses after watching the first four episodes, and I dare say that they are all better than the actual ending.
The most disappointing thing for me in the fifth episode is that the novelist is really just a listener to this story, not involved in the story, and she and Makoto Pear are not without intersection: she loves writing and was actually encouraged by Yuri in high school, and the gift that Yuri gave her is now hanging on the wall of her house. The narrator who calls herself Yuri is actually a real fan, and the reason for her pretending to be Yuri is too far-fetched for people to forget after listening to it. Yuri's perspective has completely disappeared, and she has become a symbol of kindness without any sense of reality.
Perhaps this is Yuri in Zhenfan's memory, after all, she is willing to help kill people without saying a word, and finally chooses to surrender herself to save the other two people, so in Zhenfan's narration, Yuri vows more than once to protect the other two people and make them happy. The authenticity of this point has never been challenged, and the murder of the three people in high school is more like a confused thing driven by juvenile spirit and self-esteem. After graduation, there is almost no intersection, and it is difficult to imagine how the fragile friendship of youth can develop into a determination to protect each other at all costs.
Moreover, as a crime drama, the series handles killings particularly rashly, as if as long as you are willing to do it, zero experience can be done, and the exposure of Youli is not due to the important evidence left. Just compare the murder process in "Train Freak" where the plan can't catch up with the change, the killing in "Impact" is too dramatic.
WOWOW TV series often have a dark reality style, "Influence" screenwriter Shinozaki Eriko once adapted Kakuda Mitsuyo's novel "Home on the Slope" into a suffocating TV series, this time the staff spared a lot, perhaps this plot direction follows the original novel, basically the final words are singing praises for the sick and early death of Yuri.
This treatment not only weakens the credibility of the character of Yuri, but the other two in the friendship triangle are also blurred, and there are still many questions about their relationship, which is not a perfunctory way to let the three young figures run to the end of the world at the end.