I've never been one of Japanese filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto's biggest fans, as his movies have tended to range from the dreadfully slow to the overwhelmingly stylistic. His style seems all madness and no method.  However, Nightmare Detective is a great and pleasant surprise. Tsukamoto takes his rather grim view of society, spices it up with the sort of imagery David Lynch would come up with after a few hits of LSD, and molds everything into an easy-to-swallow package, creating a thriller that's fairly accessible to Western audiences without betraying his thematic vision.

Keiko (Hitomi -- yep, just one name) is a gifted police analyst taking her first steps into the world as a full-fledged detective. But her first investigation may very well turn out to be the most bizarre one of her entire career. It seems like a cut-and-dried suicide when a young woman is found having stabbed herself to death, yet Keiko senses something fishy is at work. Her suspicions are confirmed not long afterwards, when a man apparently takes his own life in the same gruesome fashion. The common thread between the two deaths is that both victims were asleep and had  spoken to a mysterious caller known only as "0" (played by Tsukamoto himself).

After being relegated to approaching the case from a more paranormal angle, Keiko seeks the assistance of Kagenuma (Ryuhei Matsuda), a sullen young man with the ability to read peoples' minds, as well as enter their dreams. Although extremely hesitant to use his abilities at first, Kagenuma reluctantly joins the hunt to track down 0 after his influence starts to reach Keiko's colleagues.

I'm always a little leery of films about the world of dreams, because for a good chunk of the time, they end up using this an excuse to cheat their way through the entire story. Lucky for us, Nightmare Detective treats this premise not so much as a gimmicky crutch as it does a backdrop against which more thought-provoking themes are set. Though it is at heart a combination detective drama and gore-soaked horror flick, Nightmare Detective finds room for some intriguing commentary on human nature, specifically on life in Japan. The story deals quite a bit with repressed memories and cast-aside feelings, as well as with the consequences of revisiting them. With 0's first two victims being a lonely twentysomething and a pudgy salaryman, both of whom come in contact with 0 due to a shared desire to commit suicide, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Tsukamoto sees society in Japan as being more than a little stifling. Tsukamoto hypothesizes that after we take a good, long look at our inner selves, we're not going to be happy with what we see, an idea that results in the thematic floodgates opening wide.

Ruminations on our tormented psyches aside, Nightmare Detective comes across as a pretty solid thriller. The characters are stocked with familiar archetypes, from the female cop with something to prove to the sexist superior who thinks she's hardly capable of opening a door. Still, though these personalities are more than a little dusty, the performances at least make them a more bearable. Hitomi is about ten tons of adorable and handles herself well as the increasingly determined Keiko. Tsukamoto himself offers up a moody turn as the enigmatic 0, whose background may not be as black-and-white as the authorities hunting him may expect. I wasn't so impressed, however, by Matsuda's performance as the eponymous sleuth, which goes for being wounded and badass at the same time, yet comes across with all the sensitivity and sympathy of a whiny six-year-old whose ice cream fell on the sidewalk. Also, the jerky cinematography is irksome at times (although it is quite effective in hiding the detailed appearance of a monster that rears its ugly head a couple times throughout the story).

I may not be one to sing Tsukamoto's praises, but I can't deny that as a filmmaker, he shows the drive and energy to dive headfirst into shifty territory and come out with something worth watching at least once. In the case of Nightmare Detective, this something goes beyond being a morbid curiosity and emerges as a pretty fleshed-out freakfest.

MY RATING: *** (out of ****)

(Released by Weinstein Company; not rated by MPAA.)