Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

DipitySkillful an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

chaos-rampant For some reason I anticipated a noir work here or the perversion of it, a Lynchian narrative where dreams are the scene of the crime. It didn't bother me that it's not, but it did bother me that it's a hodge podge of ideas.Most of all it stands out as a Paprika played out as a cop thriller, sometimes a J-horror, even rarely a Tsukamoto film. It's weird but half- or ill-formed, not in the sense that we're watching an elipsis where details are absent of explanation as part of a design, but in the sense that it wasn't really thought out or it was believed the concept of a serial killer visiting his victims in their sleep would carry it. We even get the mandatory scene where the cop heroine fights to stay awake and is terrified to realize she isn't. This is the first letdown, that Tsukamoto doesn't realize he's in a whole other league than Wes Craven.Often with Tsukamoto the ideas he presents are largely frameworks, explorations in a general direction. He doesn't probe deeply but what appeals to me is the fascinating artifice of that exploration, the frame itself. This one has a cheap TV look and an annoying overabundance of whip zooms in and out of convalescent images, again for no apparent reason.The ending, as with the parting shot of Vital, is rather marvellous though. Against a meaningless universe, lives without purpose or direction, Tsukamoto gives us a collage of small intimate moments. The bittersweet nature of this final hold against the existential void, is that what he offers us is memory, the empty shell of something come and gone played out for comfort in the mind.Perhaps this reveals Tsukamoto's limitation as a filmmaker, in this and other films. It's great that he sees that far, into a vision of humanity which is further than most directors doing horror related work are capable of, it's a pity that he doesn't see further.

okami_ito It's amazing how easily some so-called "cineasts" can be fooled. Since Tsukamoto made his entry with his manga-goes-experimental-trash epic Tetsuo his admirers are always eager to describe his amateurish and boring outings as "challenging" and "visionary". The only thing really astonishing about this so-called director is that in his work there is no bottom-line in sight. Who would have thought that he could come up with anything worse than the terrible pretentious "Haze"? And yet we have "Nightmare Detective" a black hole of a movie that negates any form of talent for everyone involved. Despite the actual idea that someone can enter the dreams of others, there is absolutely nothing original to be found here.But yeah! i forgot - of course i just don't get it because this stuff is so "challengening" for the average viewer. In my eyes the "average viewer" is more than used to wooden performances, bad lightning and shaky hand-cameras, you can watch it on cheap TV-Shows every day. Dreams in movies have a very long history and it's really embarrassing how the subject is treated here. There is no effort made whatsoever to visualize an actual dream-sequence. Instead we get a shaky camera and pools of blood. The actors sometimes give the impression of being actually forced to participate in this mess. I guess they felt a little "challenged" too much by Tsukamotos total lack of ideas.And hey - if you really don't want to believe that this is trash, just wait for the cheap Eric Satie-Rip-Off in the soundtrack. Just awful.

poe426 NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE, like much of what Shinya Tsukamoto has done, has its readily apparent roots in manga/anime. (Manganime?) While it'll never be confused with the likes of TETSUO, BODY HAMMER or TOKYO FIST (it's clearly more like HIROKU THE GOBLIN and GEMINI), NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE more than holds its own as live-action manganime. Like some of the slower and more thoughtful anime (like GILGAMESH or WOLF'S RAIN or suchlike), it's the overall mood that is most important here. Tsukamoto says that this is the first of a proposed series of movies to feature his NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE. If so, we've got something more to look forward to.

HumanoidOfFlesh The premise of "Nightmare Detective" is very interesting:A Japanese detective investigates two mysterious and very bloody suicides,somehow connected as the two victims dialed "0" on their mobiles moments before their death.The detective comes to learn of a man who has the supposed ability to manipulate people's dreams and if the case is going to be solved the detective succumbs to the realization that she must dial the mysterious "0" herself..."Nightmare Detective" is the film about dreams,alternate realities and suicides in Japan.The viewer will be trapped in a myriad of dreams within dreams and alternating worlds.Too much shaky camera movements sometimes irritated me,but the visuals are splendid and the suicides are quite disturbing with lots of blood spilled.As a fan of Tsukamoto's unique visions I wasn't disappointed with "Nightmare Detective".