Giri / Haji: BBC-Netflix show transplants Tokyo’s yakuza into London’s underworld
- Slow-paced and well-scripted, the crime series follows a rule-bending detective on a mission to bring his brother home
- Plus, HBO brings The Outsider, Stephen King’s supernatural police thriller, to life
When two underworlds collide there’s likely to be hell to pay, and so it proves in Giri / Haji, the Japanese-British crime drama linking Tokyo’s yakuza territory to London’s gangster turf.
Morose Japanese detective Kenzo Mori (Takehiro Hira), henpecked and harassed at home in Tokyo, is on a now-streaming, eight-episode Netflix mission: to flush out and return home Yuto (Yosuke Kubozuka), his missing yakuza brother, presumed dead but actually in hiding in London, having been run out of his homeland in disgrace.
In hiding, that is, until a rash flash of uncharacteristic bravery results in his hooking up with a London crime boss, then assassinating an inadvisable target – after which Tokyo’s yakuza bosses go international with their feuding, dragging more British mobsters into the action, despite having started small with a little domestic murder and mayhem.
Narrative twists and turns keep observers (and viewers) off balance when it comes to what’s really going on and who’s deceiving whom, all achieved by a script and a cast that allow the characters to breathe and work out – or not – their weighty problems.
Giri / Haji (“Duty / Shame”) is also a tale of notable double acts: the rule-bending detective and his egregious brother; the bitchily camp male prostitute (Will Sharpe) and the obstinate Japanese schoolgirl; the vulnerable policewoman (Kelly Macdonald) and her nemesis; the yakuza boss and the Tokyo chief inspector. Light and shadow, good and bad can be found in us all, the message seems to be – even hitmen wielding ceremonial Japanese swords.
Stephen King’s The Outsider comes to life courtesy of HBO
Stephen King’s novel The Outsider is the basis for HBO’s tantalising 10-parter of the same name (Mondays at 10am on HBO Go and HBO; 10pm re-runs on HBO), a murder mystery of the grisliest kind that begins with the savage killing and mutilation of a boy by, it would seem, his hometown’s popular, upstanding baseball coach. The fingerprints, CCTV footage and even DNA of Terry Maitland (director and star Jason Bateman) put him at the crime scene; for detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn), that’s a wrap.
The trouble is, incontrovertible evidence also puts Maitland miles away at the time of the murder and he couldn’t possibly have been in two places at once. Or could he?
Don’t expect frantic action or shoot ’em-ups from speeding cars in The Outsider: the story unspools so languidly it seems to be travelling at real-time criminal-investigation pace, although in fairness that simply ratchets up the tension. And can the master of the macabre really stay off home turf, eschewing all spine-icing horrors in favour of a regular police procedural? Well, no.
The first whiff of the supernatural arrives even before the gruff Anderson declares that he has no truck with the inexplicable. Then the spooky dial really starts edging towards 11 when, stumped for answers, small-town Georgia’s finest calls in a freelance investigator Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo), with her own set of signature quirks.
A socially awkward loose cannon to her new detective chums, Gibney has an obsessively, compulsively disordered mind for minutiae and a nose for the occult. Suddenly shown to be lining up for the opposition are an obvious malcontent hanging around in a hoodie, an alleged doppelgänger and evil ethereal entities that feed on grief.
With the flesh-creep factor rising by the episode, expect more diabolical dark deeds – literally too, given all the low lighting – to be stirred into the King cauldron.
