General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Charisma (カリスマ) (1999 film)

Charisma (カリスマ, Karisuma) is a 1999 Japanese drama and suspense film directed and written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, in which a suspended police detective becomes entangled in a conflict over a single tree that poisons the forest around it. It was produced by Nikkatsu, King Records, and Tokyo Theatres, premiered at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, and opened in Japanese theaters on 26 February 2000.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Kiyoshi Kurosawa (黒沢清), born in Kobe in 1955¹^•⁴
Production and release	Made in 1999 by Nikkatsu, King Records, and Tokyo Theatres; Japanese theatrical release 26 February 2000¹^•²
Runtime	103 minutes per Nikkatsu, the National Film Archive of Japan, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam; 104 minutes per eiga.com, King Records, and the BBFC¹^•⁵^•²
Lead cast	Koji Yakusho as detective Goro Yabuike, with Hiroyuki Ikeuchi, Ren Osugi, Jun Fubuki, and Yoriko Doguchi⁶
Festival history	Screened at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival; sources differ on whether it was in the competition section or the Directors' Fortnight⁷^•³
Origin of the script	The original screenplay won a Sundance Institute (U.S.A.) fellowship in 1992, taking Kurosawa to the United States for training³
Key crew	Cinematography Junichiro Hayashi, music Gary Ashiya, art direction Tomoyuki Maruo, editing Junichi Kikuchi⁵

Spoilers

Plot

The film opens with a hostage crisis. Detective Goro Yabuike (Koji Yakusho) receives a cryptic message from a young man holding a Diet member hostage, and the standoff ends with both the captor and the hostage dead. Held responsible, Yabuike is removed from duty and drifts into a remote mountain forest.²^•¹

In the forest he encounters a single straggly tree called Charisma. According to the people living around it, the tree secretes a toxin from its roots that is withering and toppling the planted cedars and killing the surrounding vegetation, so the forest is heading toward destruction.¹^•² The Janus Films synopsis describes the tree as parasitically feeding off the surrounding ecosystem.⁸

Yabuike is drawn into a struggle among factions with incompatible demands on the tree. A young man, Kiriyama Naoto (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi), protects it; a botanist, Jinbo Mitsuko (Jun Fubuki), considers it virulently toxic and wants it destroyed for the sake of the forest; a man named Nakasone (Ren Osugi) argues for felling it in the interest of the whole woods; and a militia wants to obtain the tree for a collector.⁷^•⁹^•⁸ The question the film poses is stated on Nikkatsu's official page: keep it alive, kill it, or is coexistence impossible?¹

Themes and interpretation

Nikkatsu's synopsis frames the film as a human drama about the ethics of symbiosis and coexistence and the form of genuine freedom people seek in their subconscious.¹ The International Film Festival Rotterdam program described its theme as the primeval power of nature against man as ruler of nature, questioning whether nature's power is inherently good or evil, and noted that the finale gives no clear answer.¹⁰

Kurosawa explained the film's construction to Tom Mes in a 2001 Midnight Eye interview: he began from an American-style Indiana Jones structure of two teams vying for a treasure, but made the treasure a tree, which led him to ask what value the tree has and what condition the forest around it is in, until the film became something far more complex than the genre premise. Film, he said, is for him a midpoint between a fictional story and reality.¹¹ In a 2014 interview he said that when directing Charisma he definitely had in mind that it was an end-of-the-century film, conceived in 1999.¹²

In a later interview Kurosawa quoted the line his protagonist arrives at in the film: there is no special tree and no forest as a whole, only ordinary trees growing here and there.³ A Japanese academic study connects the film to the discourse around neo-fascism and questions whether the popular name "Charisma" for the tree is justified within the film's logic of excessive naming.¹³

Production and release

The screenplay predates the film by years. Kurosawa's original script for Charisma won a fellowship from the Sundance Institute in 1992, and he traveled to the United States for the associated training; the film itself took roughly a decade from conception to release.³^•¹⁴

After Cure (1997) was shown at the Tokyo International Film Festival, Kurosawa's international profile rose quickly: Charisma was invited to the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, and 1999 also saw License to Live at Berlin and Barren Illusion at Venice.³^•¹⁵ The film's Cannes screening triggered further French invitations, and it opened theatrically in France in December 1999, two months ahead of Japan.¹⁶ The Japanese premiere was on 26 February 2000 at Theater Shinjuku and other theaters, distributed by Nikkatsu and Tokyo Theatres.²

The National Film Archive of Japan holds a 35 mm theatrical print of 9,314.07 feet with Dolby sound.⁵ King Records released the film on DVD in its budget line on 10 January 2024 (catalog number KIBF-2809, priced at 2,090 yen including tax).¹⁷ The British Board of Film Classification passed a streaming version in May 2025, advising strong violence and drug misuse.¹⁸

Reception and standing

The British Film Institute's guide to Kurosawa's work states that Charisma is often considered his most inaccessible and obscure film, fitting no obvious genre template, and calls it a complex, highly metaphoric work that can be read almost as a sequel to Cure; it also notes that the closing scenes offer another of Kurosawa's recurring conflagration sequences.¹⁹ Festival programmers at Nippon Connection describe it as considered one of Kurosawa's masterpieces.⁴ On the Japanese review aggregator Filmarks the film holds a user score of 3.6 out of 5 from more than 5,400 reviews.²⁰

Scholarship on Kurosawa's post-Aum films analyzes Charisma alongside Pulse (2001) for the way its narrative references to radicalism engage the trauma of Japan after the 1995 sarin gas attacks.²¹ Kurosawa himself remarked in one interview that Charisma is actually considered a fairly commercial film in Japan.²²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026