Revolution +1, the first film in six years by Masao Adachi—director, actor, screenwriter, on-and-off again erotic filmmaker, and former communist militant—is a deeply unconventional dramatisation of the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s assassination by Tetsuya Yamagami. An almost parodic take on the traditional biopic form, the film has Yamagami’s thinly fictionalised double Tatsuya Kawakami (Soran Tamoto)—an ordinary citizen marked by profound personal hardship and familial tragedy—take the audience on a journey through the defining moments of his life, leading up to his assassination of Abe.

After Yamagami’s father committed suicide when he was four, his mother found relief in the predatory Unification Church, causing her to donate the family’s money and consign them to poverty. In 2005, Yamagami attempted suicide in the hopes that a life insurance payout would provide his cancer-stricken brother the means for finding treatment. Ten years later, still unable to afford medical costs, his brother committed suicide. This begins what Adachi presents as an inevitable lurch toward violence.

Due to Adachi’s laudably provocative desire to screen the film on the day of Abe’s state funeral (announced three days into principal photography), it was shot in only eight days on a meagre budget of seven million yen ($71,000 AUD), operating from a screenplay written by Junichi Inoue over the course of three days. The result is a whirlwind; the direction, writing, and style are dominated by a singular sense of urgency. Revolution +1 bounces non-chronologically from scene to scene at a blinding pace, with its frantic shooting window evidenced by its low-budget, seemingly made-for-TV production values. Meanwhile, the film’s political messages are soliloquised by Tamoto directly to the audience in a way that favours instant comprehension, eschewing any ambiguity in the direct aftermath of Abe’s death.

These ingredients could have produced a clumsy, didactic sledgehammer of a film. Instead, Adachi uses this frenzied energy to turn Kawakami’s plight into a narrative of manic intensity that matches the enormous, painful anger motivating the real Yamagami’s actions. The film’s tone leaps between emotional extremes, punctuated by equally chaotic blasts of squawking electric guitars and borderline-arrhythmic drums, all resting upon the heightened, yet heartbreaking, vulnerability and anger of Tamoto’s performance as Kawakami/Yamagami—the lynchpin without which this surreal maelstrom would surely fly apart. With surprising deftness, these elements are deployed so that the film can fulfil the dual purposes of a pre-emptive counter-propaganda piece against the inevitable posthumous martyrdom of Abe, and a genuine exploration of the assassin as a sympathetic, intelligent victim of Abe’s conservative regime—a man who seeks the personal agency denied to him by contemporary Japan in an act of self-immortalising violence.

On the surface, Revolution +1’s blunt, unapologetically partisan approach might appear to be a hijacking of the real Yamagami’s story by an infamous communist filmmaker into a work of pure propaganda. However, such a reading would fundamentally misconstrue the film, overlooking its critical edge. Although Adachi could easily have fashioned him so, Revolution +1’s Kawakami is decidedly not a Marxist proletarian warrior who fights the establishment in solidarity with the world’s oppressed peoples. On the contrary, Revolution +1 has its protagonist, as per real life, openly profess that his quest was one of personal revenge rather than an attempt to catalyse political change. Adachi instead finds a compelling political message in Yamagami by highlighting the brutal political conditions that could drive a man to such violence: Abe’s revival of Japanese nationalism, the widespread power of the predatory Unification Church, and the emaciation of the lower class by Japanese conservatism.

While imbuing the film with a unique and potent intensity, Adachi’s politically-motivated rush to produce and distribute it also means he could not foresee the most interesting consequence of Abe’s assassination. Despite Yamagami’s lack of concern toward effecting social justice, the Unification Church is now being targeted for dissolution by the Japanese government as a result of intense political scrutiny following Abe’s death. If successful, this will effectively kneecap the Church’s revenue stream by nulling its considerable tax relief as a state-recognised religion and destroy the Church’s reputation in Japan by forever associating it with Abe’s early death.

Though lacking some breathing space and nuance due to its hurried production, Revolution +1 remains a disarming feat of guerrilla filmmaking—a shotgun blast of pathos and fury aimed at Abe’s Japan that shows the painful humanity of its central assassin.

Revolution +1 screened in February as part of Obsessions: A Static Vision Festival.

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Talleyn Burch was the subject of a Daily Mail article in 2020 exposing their attempts to slander celebrity chef Curtis Stone. This earned Talleyn a sustained campaign of death threats from the Australian Masterchef community. To this day, they consider this their greatest literary achievement.