When Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece to the executives at his studio, he was promptly fired. Branded to Kill tells the ecstatically bent story of a yakuza assassin with a fetish for sniffing steamed rice (the chipmunk-cheeked superstar Joe Shishido) who botches a job and ends up a target himself. This is Suzuki at his most extreme—the flabbergasting pinnacle of his sixties pop-art aesthetic.
The Criterion Collection upgrades one of their staple titles, Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill, to 4K UHD, presenting the film with a 2160p/24hz ultra high-definition encode in 10-bit SDR and the aspect ratio of 2.39:1 on a dual-layer, BD-66 disc. The presentation is sourced from a new 4K restoration performed by Nikkatsu, scanned from the 35mm original camera negative. This edition also includes a standard dual-layer Blu-ray featuring the film in 1080p/24hz high-definition. It is the same disc Criterion released in 2011, using the same older restoration.
It’s a bit wild to see how far this film has come since Criterion’s original 1999 DVD, one of their worst early releases on the format. That release was a smudgy, highly digitized, blown-out-looking mess with little-to-no shadow detail leading to a climax in a darkened arena that was impossible to see. Yes, it was a non-anamorphic DVD from 1999. Still, even for the time, it was an absolute disaster of a presentation and more than likely a digital port of Criterion’s LaserDisc. Their Blu-ray edition improved things considerably through a sharper and cleaner-looking image with better contrast levels and far more range. Yet, it could still be a little smudgy with limited shadow definition, the master also showing its age. It’s okay, but it could still be better.
I had always assumed that was about as good as it was ever going to get for the film, yet interestingly—despite the film’s studio firing the director over the film following its original release—Nikkatsu has seen fit to give the film that has amassed a cult following through the years a new 4K restoration (that won the Venice Film Festival Award for Best Restoration), and is it ever a revelation following decades of bad to mediocre presentations with weak contrast and dynamic range. And it’s in those areas where this new restoration provides the most substantial enhancements. Despite the release not utilizing HDR (which I will say is incredibly sad considering the film’s look) range in the shadows is still pointedly wider than what was even present on the Blu-ray, the image featuring smoother transitions in the grays with richer blacks. More detail is also exposed in the darker sequences of the film, especially during that climax mentioned previously, which takes place in a darkened arena. This leads to significantly more detail in the shadows and an image that is far easier to see.
Those improvements in detail also spread to every other area of the presentation, the image now looking far sharper with textures and other fine details clearer than ever. The restoration work is also near-immaculate, and outside of some minor wear on the edges of the frame, I can’t recount anything of note ever popping up. It looks fantastic, and this may be one of the bigger surprises I’ve come across yet on the format.
