Cinedigm and Drafthouse Films have announced the Blu-ray release of filmmaker Tetsuya Nakashima's The World of Kanako. The heart-stopping tale of a father's descent into the heart of darkness arrives on Blu-ray on February 2nd.
Synopsis: Kanako (newcomer Nana Komatsu, Prophecy), a beautiful girl and high-achieving student, mysteriously disappears one day, leaving all her belongings in her room. Her mother asks her ex-husband Akikazu (Kôji Yakusho, 13 Assassins, Babel), a recently fired police detective, to go find their daughter. He starts a desperate (and increasingly unhinged) search in the hope of not just finding Kanako, but also getting his family back together.
An uncompromising revenge thriller of operatic scope, The World of Kanako is a nonstop visual and emotional assault on the senses. What Akikazu discovers as he rampages through his daughter's world is an unsettling and harrowing web of depravity - surrounding both Kanako and himself. As Akikazu stumbles along he encounters rape, prostitution, the heroin trade and the Yakuza - all while battling his own demons of alcoholism, drugs and domestic abuse. In the midst of the masterfully frenetic and ultraviolent set pieces, Nakashima (Confessions, Kamikaze Girls) creates a psychologically penetrating portrait of a man woefully unprepared for the revelations that will shatter everything he holds dear.
Nakashima's Confessions was Japan's submission for the best foreign-language film Academy Award in 2011, and The World of Kanako is an equally astonishing tour de force of mystery, beauty and boundary-pushing violence. A wildly kinetic and startlingly venomous throwback to the best that Asian extreme cinema has to offer, the film offers a trip right up to the edge of a man's private hell - and beyond it.
The World of Kanako won Best Screenplay-Fantastic Features at the 2014 Austin Film Fest and was nominated for the Audience Choice award at the 2014 Chicago International Film Festival. Star Nana Komatsu won the Newcomer of the Year award at the 2015 Awards of the Japanese Academy, while Kôji Yakusho won the Best Actor prize at the 2014 Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival.
The World of Kanako is presented in 1080p with DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround. Special features have yet to be detailed.