“Murder and suicide are the only achievable heroic acts for modern day Japanese youth.” This sentiment from a graduate student in Eizô Sugawa’s Yajû shisubeshi (US: The Beast Shall Die) foreshadows the nihilism that will grab hold of Kunihiko Date (Tatsuya Nakadai), a disaffected literature scholar who seeks to escape the drudgery of modern, mechanized society by turning into a violent criminal (“We have no choice but to show our beastly nature”). Having starred this same year in Masaki Kobayashi’s epic trilogy, The Human Condition, Nakadai is excellent as the cocky yet confused killer, embittered by his mother’s adultery and father’s suicide, while Hiroshi Koizumi plays Detective Masugi, disappointed with his low salary and lack of breaks in the cop killer case he’s pursuing with gusto; indeed, both men are thoroughly disappointed by postwar society but cope with their feelings in opposite ways. Date stuffs a corpse in a trunk, blows up a research laboratory, sets a car on fire, uses a gay teen as a human shield, and refuses to commit to his occasional girlfriend Tae (Reiko Dan) who, upon aborting his baby, confesses, “I’m a murderer too.” Slightly more restrained in their anger, Masugi and his veteran partner Kawashima (Eijiro Tono) are no longer trusted for their instincts on the street, new forensic technology displacing their detection skills and forestalling their justifiable arrest of Date in the absence of convincing evidence. Even the professor (Nobuo Nakamura), who employs Date as a translator on the side, seems bored and impoverished, his only solace access to his wife’s wealth and stature. Koizumi’s cinematography is dynamic, at times frenetic, shooting from ceilings, through car windows, across industrial wastelands, never quite illuminating a rational motive in Date or those who hunt him.