THE CENTENNIAL CASE: A SHIJIMA STORY

Square Enix brings together real life and fake deaths

After the critical drubbing handed out to Square Enix’s previous FMV venture, The Quiet Man, the company’s decision to produce a live-action mystery adventure evokes less a whodunnit than why make it? For director Koichiro Ito, it’s a chance to tap into Japan’s appetite for detective novels and mystery television dramas, but one that benefits from flesh-and-blood actors. “I think that having real people play the characters in the story adds a sense of depth to it,” he says. Enlisting Yasuhito Tachibana as the cinematographer and scenario director also avoids pitfalls – with a hit Netflix show, The Naked Director, to his name, he brings the production nous to avoid the hackier B-movie vibes that often plague the genre.