Film Review: "Missing: The Lucie Blackman Case" ("警視庁捜査一課 ルーシー・ブラックマン事件") (2023).

From the director of The Distance comes Missing: The Lucie Blackman Case (警視庁捜査一課 ルーシー・ブラックマン事件). This Japanese crime documentary film directed by Hyoe Yamamoto, and based on the book by Shoji Takao. July 1, 2000. British twenty-one-year-old Lucie Blackman goes missing in Tokyo, sparking an international investigation — and an unyielding quest for justice.

Born on 10 August 1952, Zainichi Korean serial rapist, Joji Obara (織原 城二) raped between one-hundred and fifty and four-hundred women. Born Kim Sung-jong (김성종), Obara's father worked his way from scrap collector to immensely wealthy owner of a string of properties and pachinko parlors. Obara was educated at private Tokyo schools, and received daily tutoring in a variety of subjects. At age fifteen, he enrolled in a prestigious prep school affiliated with Keio University, virtually guaranteeing his acceptance into the university. Two years later, after his father's death in Hong Kong, Obara inherited property in Osaka and Tokyo. After traveling extensively and graduating from Keio University with degrees in politics and law, he became a naturalized Japanese citizen and legally changed his name. Obara invested heavily in real estate speculation, gaining assets estimated as much as $38 million. After losing his fortune and his firm in the 1990s recession, he was pursued by creditors, and reportedly used his business as a money laundering front for the yakuza syndicate Sumiyoshi-kai. Obara was a drug user who was reported to have a fixation on white women. He developed a pattern of criminal behavior, beginning with unlawfully administering drugs to render his victims unconscious and abduct and rape them. Obara victimized women of both Japanese and Western backgrounds. He recorded his attacks on videotape, at least four-hundred of which were recovered by police, giving them cause to believe that he might have raped anywhere from one-hundred and fifty to four-hundred women. Police found extensive journals in which Obara made reference to "conquest play", a euphemism describing his sexual assaults on women whom he wrote were "only good for sex" and on whom he sought "revenge on the world" drugging them with chloroform. In addition, he was charged with drugging, raping and killing a British woman, Lucie Blackman, in October 2000, the rape and manslaughter of an Australian woman, Carita Ridgway, and the rape of eight other women. In 2007, Obara was jailed for life on multiple rape charges and manslaughter, but was acquitted of Blackman's rape and murder for lack of direct evidence. In December 2008, the Tokyo High Court found Obara guilty on the counts of abduction, dismemberment and disposal of Blackman's body. Blackman's death, as well as Obara's trial, received extensive press coverage internationally, especially in Britain.

With an evocative mix of dramatizations, archival footage and testimony from many who were involved in aspects of the case, the narrative reveals both monstrous crimes and an ineffective response.

Simon says Missing: The Lucie Blackman Case (警視庁捜査一課 ルーシー・ブラックマン事件) receives: