Charisma

Charisma (カリスマ, 1999) is a Japanese psychological thriller you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and starring Koji Yakusho. A detective freezes at the key moment of a hostage crisis, then walks out of his job and his life without explanation.

He ends up at the edge of a mountain forest, where a gnarled, solitary tree called Charisma has become the centre of an escalating dispute. A lab researcher insists it poisons everything around it. A small faction treats it as something almost sacred. A third group wants to cut it down and sell it. From this absurd standoff, Kurosawa builds a cold, unsettling fable — one that uses a single tree to ask what authority is, and who gets to decide what survives.

Shot directly after Cure (1997), it confirms Kurosawa was operating at a register most thriller directors never reach. Stream Charisma online on iFILM.