Review | Fortuna’s Eye film review: Kasumi Arimura, Ryunosuke Kamiki play star-crossed lovers in fantasy romance weepie
- This tale of a young man who knows when people are going to die has great potential
- However, as the plot unfolds, it turns out as predictable as it is tedious
2/5 stars
If you had the ability to see people’s fate, to know when they were about to die, would you tell them? Even if it jeopardised your own life? This is the quandary at the heart of Fortuna’s Eye, Takahiro Miki’s misty-eyed adaptation of Naoki Hyakuta’s bestselling novel.
Ryunosuke Kamiki plays Shinichiro, a young loner who works at a garage polishing luxury sports cars. Orphaned from an early age, after a plane crash that he survived but his parents didn’t, “Shin” has developed the ability to literally see through people who are close to death – and the more transparent they become, the more imminent their demise.
For years Shin has tried to ignore his gift, but is eventually compelled to act when he meets the beautiful Aoi (Kasumi Arimura) at a smartphone store and foresees her death. Simply by inviting her for coffee, it appears that her untimely passing has been averted. But at that moment, Shin suffers a severe chest pain and learns that his intervention has threatened his own life.
The film’s title alludes to the ancient Roman goddess, who could see the future, but as a result, was cursed to know her own fate. Miki’s film attempts to trigger a philosophical debate over whether you would, or should, sacrifice your own life to save that of a loved one, but in truth Fortuna’s Eye is just another high-concept premise to peddle yet another doomed romance between pretty young things.
The film opens strongly, with the haunting image of a young Shin clambering through the wreckage of a plane crash, watching in horror as life slips away from the injured passengers strewn around him. But soon enough the story has jumped forward 20 years, and we are in the all-too-familiar territory of a burgeoning romance between socially ill-equipped introverts capable of little more than squeaking at each other like bashful guinea pigs.
Kamiki and Arimura are both hardened veterans of this soft-focus, shamelessly manipulative genre, arriving on-screen equipped with enough doe eyed stares and weapons-grade levels of social awkwardness to end both their lives prematurely.
What unfolds is as predictable as it is agonisingly tedious, as we witness the genuinely fascinating potential of the film’s premise fade away. Instead, Fortuna’s Eye proves a generic and wholly unremarkable weepie that is undeserving of anything approaching a sympathetic emotional response.
