LEY LINES

“I can sympathize with feeling alien among other human beings and in Ley Lines that's focused through an internal realism of four kids just trying to fucking live.”
— Willow Maclay, LETTERBOXD

After years working almost exclusively in Japans’s “V-cinema” (direct-to-video) world, Takashi Miike announced himself as a world-class filmmaking talent with this trio of crazy, thematically-connected, character-centric crime stories about violence, the underworld of Japanese society, families both real and surrogate, and the possibly hopeless task of finding one's place in the world. His first works made specifically for theatrical release, the “Black Society Trilogy” (SHINJUKU TRIAD SOCIETY, RAINY DOG and LEY LINES) was the beginning of Miike's career of international renown. LEY LINES follows a trio of Japanese youths of Chinese descent who escape their semi-rural upbringing and relocate to Shinjuku, where they befriend a troubled Shanghai prostitute and fall foul of a local crime syndicate. Like many of Miike’s movies, LEY LINES examines the underbelly of respectable Japanese society and the problems of assimilation faced by non-ethnically Japanese people in Japan.