Isn't Anyone Alive? - The world is ending? Meh....

Review
Film: Isn't Anyone Alive?
Director: Gakuryu Ishii
Country: Japan

I'm concerned I may be about to be overly critical about Isn't Anyone Alive? Not because it was a terrible film (I enjoyed quite a lot of it) but if feels liked a really wasted opportunity.

So I will start with the positive aspects.  The central idea is an interesting and original one.  One day, people start dying, not through any plague of zombies, alien invasion or rampaging serial killer, they just start to fit, choke and die.  And the apathetic students that the film focuses on haven't got the energy to react, the empathy to respond emotionally or the wherewithal to respond in any kind of usefully practical way.  This does lead to a lot of very humorous moments - and it is genuinely funny at times, particularly the character of Dr. Fish.

I'm not sure if I can quite put my finger on as to why it doesn't fully work.  There is something about the tone of the film that feels uneven and like the director either didn't have the courage of his convictions or just didn't quite get it right.  Like I mentioned, the film has the ability to be very funny.  But sometimes either the humour falls flat, or the film is perhaps trying to be more dramatic and emotionally real but this comes out of nowhere and doesn't mesh together properly.  The film is almost too cool and cold, when it needs to be more savagely, angrily funny. It is clearly trying to make a point about the almost sociopathic apathy and detachment of a generation living lives filtered by the media and not in the real world.

Possibly one of the problems is the lack of character development, or character realisation.  The characters are all incompetent at dealing with life and the events around them, and there isn't sufficient variety between them, nor anything at all that makes you really care one way or the other what happens.  I suppose this could be deliberate, given that this lack of interest is replicating much of how the characters react to the events around them, but it just leaves the viewer disengaged.  It is also an idea which is stretched out without much new being added as it goes on, so it becomes less interesting as the film progresses, and the only thing that keeps the viewer from giving up are the ongoing bizarre and surreal interactions of the soon to be dead.  Perhaps the abandoning of all the normal clichés and plot drivers of films dealing with this kind of subject matter is just too disorientating.

It is a slightly messy and flat realisation of what could have been a truly original film, but it is redeemed by being just humorous enough, just often enough.  There probably are people out there for whom this film will work, but I wasn't one of them.