When Nami (Kumi Takiuchi) was a little girl, she felt neglected by her parents, what with her mother caught up in the plight of children in poverty abroad, and her father caught up in her mother, both too preoccupied to pay any attention to their youngest daughter. She would try to draw them to her with bad behaviour, ranging from spilling her drink at the dinner table to attacking a classmate badly enough to send him to hospital, but nothing she did won her the focus she wanted, with even her older sister barely tolerating her other than to be embarrassed by her antics. Then one day her mother went abroad forever for charity work, and Nami's father sank into a deep depression...
The upshot of that being he retreats to a room in their house with his mysterious mistress, and Nami is even more isolated, which turned out to be a theme director Eiji Uchida was interested in pursuing, that in modern Japan, and maybe not only there, individuals were being left to go slightly mad as their loneliness took its toll. Initially, he appears to be taking Nami as an example of that, but when we get to her as she is grown up, we find she is taking up her time with determinedly cataloguing the behaviour of the folks she spots in the city who she terms "Solitarians", no, not the diminutive, warlike villains from Doctor Who, but those who have slipped through the cracks in society.
Indeed, Nami relishes discovering a new instance of such a person, writing notes in her journal and spying on them through binoculars or a telescope. She's never happier when she finds their bodies, corpses that have not been uncovered in their houses because nobody else knew they were there, and takes a selfie with the deceased with unconcealed delight. It's clear she is somewhere short of sanity, but in the early stages you could at least discern a daffy sense of humour about her antics, bleak and twisted as they were, yet as the narrative drew on there was a more horror movie informed development, especially as she witnesses her fun in playing Peeping Tom with the most forgotten members of the community hampered by do-gooders.
This is down to a Christian group in the area who have made it their mission to help the lonely by sending representatives of their church around to their home for a spot of Bible reading. Once Nami notices one such session in the home of her latest and favourite discovery, a grumpy old ex-celeb (Takashi Sasano) who previously had no time for anyone has he wound down into his inevitable demise, she is extremely angry. After all, who are these people to reverse the effects of her targets' misery which she so loves to wallow in? Therefore, recruiting a younger Solitarian she often sees in the park feeding pigeons and occasionally attacking those passersby who would ridicule him, she sets about trying to restore the frankly depressing order of things as she sees fit.
Nami's sister also has a part to play, a woman for whom being as ordinary as possible was her reaction to their parents' oddness, and before long she twigs Nami is up to no good, which is a factor in events brought to a head in the bloody last half hour. Although the bearings of the story were shifted so you could not tell if you were watching a wacky comedy, a sympathetic drama or out and out gory shocker, Uchida kept his theme of the toll of being alone in an increasingly crowded world uppermost in the film, yet his ultimate point further than "We should really address this in society" was rather difficult to discern. At times he was throwing in sequences seemingly for the hell of it, purely for effect - a female on male rape here, the results of walking barefoot onto a floor covered in tacks there - which tended to go against his apparently sincere concerns, though you could accept it was a method of highlighting them that was certainly going to be memorable. That said, the question of whether we despise or pity Nami was going to be a thorny dilemma; Uchida eventually leans towards the latter.
