Many spectators will know Seiji Tanaka from his incredibly satisfying crime comedy-drama Melancholic (2018). However, after this incredible debut, it remained silent for many years.  Those who anticipated more of his work were treated with not one but two new feature films in 2025.

Sadly, only one of those, The Man Who Failed to Die (2025), could re-affirm his talent. His action film, Demon City, an adaptation of Masamichi Kawabe’s manga Oni Goroshi, on the other hand, exposed his weak points, revealing that he, as director and writer, has still room for improvement.

  

Tanaka’s narrative follows Shuhei Sakata (Toma Ikuta), a hitman who decides to retire to protect his family. However, on the night of his retirement, a bunch of demon-masked men forcefully enter his house. These men, who took control over Shinjo city, brutally murder his wife (Ami Kiryu) and his daughter Ryo in front of his eyes. They shoot him as well, the sole person who they deem can threaten their hold over the city, but he miraculously survives, planting the seed that will give birth to the feared murderous demon they sought to vanquish.  

12 years later, the paralysed Sakata is released from hospital prison. Yet, not much later, after being hospitalized by one of his former victims, the seed of vengeance starts to blossom when one of the demon-masked men, Shinozuka (Masanobu Takashima), a high-ranked police official, tries to murder him once and for all. 

Tanaka opens his film with a simple statement that structures the whole narrative: The moment a human being lets himself be consumed by his desire for revenge, he becomes a demon. Or, to put it more psychoanalytically, the subject who succumbs to the enjoyment of taking revenge shatters his own humanity and radically disregards the humanity of the other.

Tanaka signals, in other words, that the path of revenge, the thirst for transgressive enjoyment, goes hand in hand with radical dehumanization. While such statement might lead some spectators to assume Tanaka will critically explore the dehumanizing effect of vengeful violence, Tanaka merely utilizes this statement to affirm his commitment to visually please the spectator with brutal violence beyond any kind of moral questioning. We are invited to simply savour the destructive path Sakata, as a simple instrument of revengeful thirst, embarks on.

The narrative consequences of such a simple dualistic logic – revenger (ego) vs victim (alter-ego) – and the focus on transgressive violence should not surprise anyone. The narrative is simple and straightforward with little thematical depth. However, such lack of depth would have been easier to digest if Tanaka could have found an effective rhythm for the unfolding of his narrative. Tanaka sabotage the flow of Demon City because he, despite wanting to put the emphasis on violence, spends too much time contextualizing Sakata’s revengeful quest – a little less talking, a little bit more action.

The problematic rhythm of the narrative also makes the sudden shift to the brutal violent finale around the hour-mark feel forced. Despite trying to smoothen the transition with a revelation concerning Sakata’s familial trauma, Tanaka is unable to leverage the traumatic opening of his narrative to give this reveal any emotional or dramatic power.     

      

Thematically speaking, Demon City touches upon the idea that positive mediatized images often repress perverse truths (e.g. the human trafficking and the drugs business of the kimen-gumi) which function as the social fiction’s support as well as the well-trodden idea that power corrupts, inviting the subject who holds power to perversely exploit it to safeguard his position. Signifiers like false testimonies and factual evidence, signifiers the mayor (Matsuya Onoe) readily utilizes to attack journalist Kamimiya (-) at a press conference, supports the mediatized fiction of uncorrupted harmony and revitalization and forces the common other to forego his critical questioning of the subject-in-power, the authority figure.   

One can, in this sense, read Demon City not only as a narrative of revenge, but as a narrative that evokes the brutal return of the repressed. Sakata does not merely confront his enemies with the destructivity of their acts by annihilating his enemies, but also attempts, quite unintentionally, to rip the marketable fantasy concerning Shinjo city’s revitalisation open and forcing the disconcerting truth to reveal itself.

However, this attempt fails, not only because those in power can exploit their power to protect the truth from being registered by the societal Other, but also because the signs that point towards the truth – the dilapidated areas of city – are dismissed by others – they rather invest in a self-satisfying fiction that confront the societal problems.

Tanaka does his best to stage the brutality of the violence in a satisfactory way for the spectator. The director, just like Takashi Miike, seeks to entice the spectator’s imagination with an evocative combination of visually showing the initiating moment of the violent act with static shots, aurally evoking the completion of the act (e.g. the swishing of his saw-like weapon), and the exposition of its brutal and destructive effects (e.g. blood splatter, … etc). The combination of enticingly showing and evocatively hearing defines, moreover, Tanaka’s approach to the action-sequences and his attempt to please the spectator with the choreographies.

Tanaka relies heavily on musical accompaniment to give his violent action-choreographies a cool flavour. However, the way he handles musical accompaniment – it is too present and does not accord with the flow of the on-screen action – does little to enhance the impact the action-sequences. Rather than breathing a certain brutal coolness into the choreographies, the bombastic music ends up sabotaging the spectator’s attempt to fully savour the action.

In our view, Tanaka over-utilizes music to compensate for his restrained framing, hereby exposing his unconscious doubt in his own skill to frame these sequences in an enticing and exciting manner. It also seems Tanaka does not fully grasp that action is not only about offering the spectator a decent number of satisfying action-moments, but to pull the spectator into the action by letting the ebb and flow of the action visually breathe (Cine-note 1).   

With Demon City, Seiji Tanaka delivers a good action experience. He delivers many pleasing moments of action and violent brutality for the spectator to savour, yet struggles to craft an emotionally potent backbone to contextualize and strengthen the impact of these bursts of violence. Moreover, he shies away from going all in on the violence, leaving the spectator with a fun, yet extremely forgettable experience. 

  

Notes

Cine-note 1: Seiji Tanaka often cowers back from framing moments of brutal violence with the temporal elegance they deserve. Despite making many effective compositional choices, he does not always find the right pace to give those moments their awe-inspiring quality, to give those moments the potency to fuel the spectator’s imagination.    

The repetitive refusal to go all out with the framing of violence, moreover, renders the spectator unable to truly get into the flow of the action. Tanaka, more often than not, stops the action at the very moment the spectator is ready to commit to the framing of the brutality.