Masked Hotel: Keigo Higashino played an emotional card in the mystery story.

The film Masked Hotel is adapted from the novel of the same name by Keigo Higashino, a famous Japanese mystery writer. The sales of the original in Japan have exceeded 4 million. The film was produced by Dongbao Company and gathered many stars such as Kimura Takuya, Masami Nagasawa, Matsu Takako and Atsuko Maeda. When it was released in Japan, the box office and word of mouth were quite good. Apart from the influence of Keigo Higashino and the all-star cast, as a commercial film, this film reflects the superb professional standards of Japanese film industry in photography, costumes, props, lighting, music and fine arts.

More importantly, the professionalism embodied in this work can arouse the audience's cultural identity with Japan.

Stills of the movie "The Masked Hotel"

Workplace spirit and all beings in society

Although it begins with a serial murder case, half the length of Masked Hotel focuses on the relationship between hotel and workplace spirit, which makes the film closer to a mixture of professional drama and suspense film. The hotel is like a drama stage, which takes turns to stage different secret life stories of hotel guests, like a complicated and tangled social kaleidoscope. In this process, through the confrontation and cooperation between male and female protagonists, the professional, rigorous and dedicated professionalism highly respected by Japanese society is fully reflected.

In a business reasoning film aimed at entertainment, trying to present the Japanese craftsman spirit, if it is too straightforward, it will be a bit blunt, with advanced ideas or too preaching. However, the original novel skillfully integrates professionalism into the conflict between characters, allowing the audience to unconsciously accept the idea that the author wants to convey in the process of watching the hero and heroine bicker from incompatible opposites to mutual assistance in solving crimes.

Male and female protagonists have different identities and opposite ideas, which will inevitably collide with all kinds of interesting sparks. Kimura Takuya, the criminal policeman Hirosuke Xintian, secretly sneaked into the hotel in order to find clues about serial killings. He is very devoted to solving crimes and exploring the truth. As a newcomer to the hotel industry, he often feels embarrassed; Masami Nagasawa plays a beautiful hotel employee on a hillside, and adheres to the professional concept of customer first in the hotel service industry, believing that many things can be improvised under this premise. When they cooperate to deal with various problems, they are bound to bump into each other and be tit for tat. Various conflicts construct the daily drama of movies. This group of "Tell it to the Judge" characters adds some comic tonality to the tension and suspense, making the overall atmosphere more relaxed and interesting.

The principle of the heroine's hotel work-patience, courtesy, meticulous attitude and never letting go of every detail-embodies the serious and meticulous professionalism of the Japanese service industry to the maximum extent. This spirit is reflected by the heroine's casual but habitual little gesture of straightening the paperweight. As a professional spirit of criminal police, the hero is good at observation and reasoning and never misses a detail. In the most intense climax of the film, it is precisely because the hero observed the heroine's action of straightening the paperweight before that he noticed the placement of paperweight in a room when looking for the heroine kidnapped by the prisoner, and then judged that the prisoner and the heroine were hiding in this room. It can be said that it is the professional habits of the hero and heroine that come together and interact with each other to find the key breakthrough.

Keigo Higashino's film adaptation

However, since the film was released in China, the ratings are not as good as other films adapted from Dongye novels.

The reason is that, apart from the lack of singing skills, this film, whether it is the original novel or the adapted film, is really not in the first echelon with the best quality in Keigo Higashino's works sequence. There are too many things that the work wants to express, not only to express the protagonist's professionalism, but also to select and delete the stories of all the people in the bar, which leads to the loose overall narrative and the lack of necessary logical connection between the main line of the case and multiple sub-plots. This narrative structure, if it is in a novel or adapted into a TV series with a unit structure, may not be a problem, but in a closed mainstream narrative film, it leads to a lack of emotional power in the end. The light comedy style of the film may make the audience feel happy in the process of watching, but after the film is over, it can't bring profound emotional sound and shock. Among the best adapted works, such as Keigo Higashino, A Night Walk and The Dedication of Suspect X, the emotional power is extremely powerful.

Stills of the movie "Night Walk"

As the most popular Japanese writer of mystery novels, Keigo Higashino absorbed the advantages of Benguer School and Social School, including the wonderful suspense and meticulous reasoning process of Benguer School, the complex and ambiguous human factors of Social School, the subtle and tangled emotional relationship, and the detailed description of social reality.

Besides Nocturnal Travel, his most adapted works are Kaga Kyouichirou series and Galileo series. The series of "Detective Galileo" is biased towards stereotypes, paying attention to brain burning and the complexity of cases, while the series of novels of "Kaga Kyouichirou" are biased towards social reasoning and attach importance to exploring the depth of human nature and depicting emotions. Adapted works include TV series Malicious, New Participants, the movie Sleeping Forest, Wings of Kirin, Red Finger and The End of Prayer.

The popularity of these mystery films and dramas is not because traditional mystery novels rely on a complicated and tortuous case reasoning process, but because they pay attention to "moving people with emotion". The most sensational works, such as Nocturnal Walking, The Dedication of Suspect X, The End of Prayer and Red Finger, all show a deep and touching feeling-love or affection.

Stills of the movie "The Dedication of Suspect X"

Keigo Higashino's creation turned to social reasoning, precisely because social reasoning is not limited to the old routine of "setting suspense reasoning, arranging the maze of reasoning and finally solving the mystery", but integrating social background and reality, human nature issues and emotional relationships into reasoning stories, so that readers who are not fans of reasoning can have great fun reading the stories of these novels. It can be said that it was from Seicho Matsumoto that the social school mystery novels continued by Miyuki Miyabe, Kotaro Isaka and Keigo Higashino really made mystery novels an important branch of Japanese literature.

From the perspective of Japanese film history, most of the most influential mystery films are also adapted from social mystery novels, such as Seicho Matsumoto's Sand, Fog Flag, Zero Focus and Seiichi Morimura's Witness. These works are rich in emotion, humanity, ethics and social reality, which not only deepen the depth of reasoning works, but also easily arouse the emotional resonance of the audience.

It can even be said that in Keigo Higashino's novels and adaptations, reasoning is just a container, and its richer and more textured social reality is the ontology of the works. Suspense, reasoning and fantasy are more closely and organically intertwined with human emotions. After the film, the audience may not remember the reasoning process of the case, but they will be moved by the deep, selfless and dedicated emotional fetters in the film.

Stills of the movie "The Masked Hotel"

The All-Star cast of The Masked Hotel is also one of the important strategies of Keigo Higashino's film adaptation. These works with best-selling original works and excellent box office results of adaptation films often deepen the popularity of the protagonists with the help of star charm, such as Tang Chuanxue played by Fukuyama Masaharu and Kaga Kyouichirou played by Hiroshi Abe. Even the actors or victims of criminals often choose influential first-line stars to interpret a story of personal depravity or crime and atonement for love, such as Shinichi Tsuga in The Dedication of Suspect X, Satoshi Ishihara in Sleeping Forest, Nakai Kichi in Wings of Kirin, Matsushima Nanako in The End of Prayer, and Matsu Takako in Masquerade Hotel.

The reason why Keigo Higashino's works have been photographed again and again, even in China and South Korea, where there is no tradition of reasoning literature, is precisely because the creators in these countries often value an emotional story full of emotional power instead of a tortuous and bizarre crime main line. The filmization of Keigo Higashino's reasoning works focuses on the route of emotion and humanity, and attracts the audience by melodrama, which is also very effective from the perspective of genre narrative strategy. Coincidentally, in several domestic suspense dramas "Skyscraper" and "Bai Yueguang" this year, we also saw this emotional-centered genre narrative, which may be the most potential direction of genre creation.

Author: Liu Qi (Doctor of Film Studies, Assistant Research Fellow of China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Film Art Center)

* Wen Hui's exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source.