#2260

I can’t say I liked or enjoyed the film, but I watched it to the end out of stubborn curiosity, just to see how it would wrap up. As far as I am concerned, two things stand out about this movie: it makes you wonder, and in a strangely sadistic way, it’s intriguing. This brings me up to my central question—what drove director Tetsuya Mariko to make this film, apparently inspired by real-life anecdotes?

Destruction Babies (2016) is a Japanese drama film directed by Tetsuya Mariko and written by Mariko and Kōhei Kiyasu, starring Yūya Yagira, Masaki Suda, Nana Komatsu, and Nijirō Murakami. Set in the port district of Mitsuhama and the nearby city of Matsuyama in Ehime Prefecture, the film follows Taira Ashihara, a teenage boy who abruptly leaves home and begins attacking strangers at random. His violence attracts Yuya Kitahara, who first records the assaults and then joins in, escalating the brutality. Meanwhile, Taira’s younger brother searches for him, attempting to understand his behavior. The film is noted for its stark cinematography by Yasuyuki Sasaki, music by Hidenori Mukai, and its refusal to offer psychological explanations or moral framing.

Mariko has stated that the film was partly inspired by real anecdotes of spontaneous street violence he encountered or heard about while living in Matsuyama. Rather than dramatize a specific case, he sought to depict violence as an empty, directionless impulse — a force that spreads through imitation rather than motive. Critics have highlighted the film’s portrayal of violence as a kind of void, its exploration of youth alienation, and its unsettling depiction of brutality unfolding in ordinary public spaces.

WATCH THE FILM BELOW WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES

LINK https://ok.ru/video/305423256309

Notes: What inspired the director to make this movie

Tetsuya Mariko has explained in several interviews that Destruction Babies emerged from his interest in sudden, unmotivated violence that can erupt in everyday spaces. Although he doesn’t cite a specific case, he notes that the film draws on real anecdotes and situations he witnessed or heard about while living in regional cities such as Matsuyama, where it wasn’t unusual for young men to get into spontaneous street fights in broad daylight. Rather than reconstruct a particular incident, Mariko wanted to capture the feeling of unpredictability — that moment when ordinary life breaks without warning and violence appears as a pure impulse.

The Harvard Film Archive’s analysis highlights that much of his work revolves around characters trapped in cycles of extreme antisocial behavior, transforming common public spaces into stages for sudden bursts of aggression. Destruction Babies fits squarely within this approach: violence doesn’t function as narrative motivation but as a contagious void, a force that spreads through imitation rather than intention. Taken together, these sources show that Mariko distills a real-world pattern — fights without ideology, banal brutality, young men absorbed by the inertia of the blow — to construct a film that reflects the texture of those episodes rather than the story of any single one.

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