From Sion Sono, the director of LOVE EXPOSURE and SUICIDE CLUB.  COLD FISH has won acclaim at both the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals. In the film, mild-mannered Shamoto’s teenage daughter gets caught shoplifting. A generous fellow fish-store owner and his wife appear to help resolve the situation by having her work at their fish store. Too good to be true?  You bet! Shamoto soon discovers the horrific truth about this seemingly perfect couple…who inextricably weave him into their grisly rituals. Inspired by true events, COLD FISH is a twisted, brutal, blood-soaked drama that reveals the underlying insanity of an ordinary man pushed well beyond the brink

Learning How to Be a Serial Killer in Cold Fish

With his impulse to sensationalize, Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono broadcasts the internal minutiae of his characters as something bolder, transforming Cold Fish from an exploration of jealousy, desire, pride, ego, and personal disappointment into a perversely comic Grand Guignol. The owner of a struggling fish store is unexpectedly taken under the wing of a much more successful proprietor and soon learns that shopkeeper's shady techniques in business, life, love, and murder. Sono takes the procedural patience of Zodiac and turns it inside out; instead of tracing the steps of how to find a killer, he rather exactingly and methodically assays how to become one. The film's gory high-body-count climax is by turns terrifying and sickening, queasily funny, and, finally, impishly insolent. As the maniacal killer, the actor Denden brings a loopy charisma and offbeat intensity, scary and goofy at the same time. His unlikely student Mitsuru Fukikoshi remains shy and ambivalent, a helpless bystander in his own life even as his hands become increasingly bloody. In comparison with the maximalist four-hours-plus of Sono's 2008 Love Exposure, the running time of Cold Fish feels downright breezy at a mere two and a half hours. The film moves at a brisk pace with an absurdly extended climax of unhinged rage and debauched butchery that goes on for nearly an hour. Sono's sense of time and pacing is purely his own, drawn perhaps from his background with the idiosyncratic ebb and flow of poetry. Cold Fish is wild, head-turning, stomach-churning stuff, and it makes a bracing addition to the overstuffed canon of serial-killer cinema.

- Mark Olsen, The Village Voice

"Call it a horror film, a two-headed character study, a morality tale, or a rumination on the fragility of the human ego ... Cold Fish is smart, devious, and confrontational filmmaking from a man who's quickly becoming a master at this sort of stuff." -FearNet.com, Scott Weinberg
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"Cold Fish is Sion Sono's true return to form. It is an indictment of the extremes of humanity; the culpability of such sins is explored and laid out with obscene violence and cold calculated despondency, and the results are overwhelming." -TwitchFilm.com, Kwenton Bellette
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"Sono pushes forward with his perverse sense of humor, tales of brutal murders—you'll find many scenes of human flesh being gleefully diced up in "Cold Fish" — and more nutjob characters than ever." -KPCC, Off Ramp, Lainna Fader
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"Sion Sono opens Cold Fish with jittery jump cuts and bursts of noise and color, but then slows the movie down to the pace of a classic noir... Cold Fish moves with the inexorable pull of a nightmare." -The AV Club, Noel Murray
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"Where can I sign up for this film's inevitable cult? 10/10" -Ain't It Cool News
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Festivals/Awards:
Austin Fantastic Fest
Pusan International Film Festival
Toronto International Film Festival
Boston Underground Film Festival
Venice International Film Festival
Oslo International Film Festival
Calgary International Film Festival