On Aug. 25, 2017, a live-action adaptation of the TV series “Death Note” was released on Netflix to virtually no fanfare. A few months earlier, it had garnered some pre-release chatter for continuing in the time-honored tradition of clumsy American remakes of acclaimed Asian properties. It sputtered to 36% on Rotten Tomatoes and was promptly forgotten by nearly everyone. Some still remember, though. Listen closely. I am going to tell you something of utmost importance. The wool has been pulled over our eyes. “Death Note” is secretly a masterpiece, and we need to find out who did it.
“Death Note” is a manga that ran from 2003 to 2006. Acclaimed for its slow pace, dark subject matter and psychological intrigue, it follows a cat-and-mouse game as world-class detective L searches through Japan for Light Yagami, a psychotic teenager armed with the magical, eponymous Death Note. There isn’t much literal action, but there is psychological action as the two leads struggle for symbolically loaded control. It’s considered a classic for a reason, and it’s no small task to remake it. At a glance, the writers of Netflix’s 2017 English adaptation are distinctly not up to the challenge.
Charles and Vlas Parlapanides, two writers without a single Wikipedia page between them, and Jeremy Slater, screenwriter for 2015 critical bomb “Fant4stic,” create what is, to put it kindly, not much of anything on paper. “Death Note” removes the central internal monologues from the original manga, and Americanizes everything. Light Yagami becomes Light Turner (Nat Wolff, “Paper Towns”), Misa Amane becomes Mia Sutton (Margaret Qualley, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”), and Tokyo, Japan, becomes Seattle, Washington. Despite that, the largest change is in the spirit of the piece. “Death Note” (2017) is an engagement with the very idea of Americanizing a story. It trades intrigue for chase scenes, the anime’s famous thoughtful piano compositions for ’80s synth pop and the muted aesthetic for in-your-face neon, guns and explosions. Does this suck? I mean, yeah, a little, but glimpses of intentionality begin to peek through. Is it artless garbage or a beautiful engagement with its societal role as artless garbage? When Light Yagami declares himself Kira and says it “kinda means killer in Japanese,” you start to wonder. Do they know?
I adore the performances in this movie. LaKeith Stanfield (“The Book of Clarence”) as the oxymoronically incompetent superdetective L and Margaret Qualley as love interest-turned-villain Mia Sutton give such over-the-top performances they each seem to be the only ones in on the joke. Qualley’s Mia is such a horrible selfish caricature of a human being that a viewer can’t help but come back around to her side. Willem Dafoe (“Poor Things”) plays death-god Ryuk with some loving practical and special effects, fitting well with the movie’s polished aesthetic, and personal props go to Shea Whigham (“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”), the single best actor to ever play 5,000 police officers. The crowning achievement of this film’s toeing the line vis-a-vis acting is definitely LaKeith Stanfield; epitomized in the film’s climactic chase scene, where, in an otherwise self-serious sequence while running through a diner, LaKeith Stanfield as L shoves a bystander’s head into his soup while running for no apparent reason. In the moment, it’s easy to brush right past this, since a lot is happening, but someone here had to know. Someone, perhaps even the mastermind of this conspiracy, compelled a completely senseless act of soup violence. Is it a joke? Kind of, but if it is, it’s at the movie’s expense, seriously undercutting the tension in this final confrontation. It vexes me. Who could have been behind this?
Adam Wingard, the director of this film, is best known for his current work in Universal’s Monster Universe, though he made his name-making mumblecore films in the early 2000s. Being one of the few constants tying so many elements together, he could be the one responsible for the movie’s self-aware tone, clashing with its more dramatic elements. The film’s tone is constant whiplash, flipping between serious scenes like Light’s disposing of his FBI agent tails and almost-comedic elements like Light’s cartoon top hat he wears to prom. This back and forth comes to a head when, the moment it comes to an end, the movie plays out “The Power of Love” by Air Supply, and without a second to waste, like a Disney Channel original movie, the credits play with bloopers of each character’s actor breaking or laughing, still set to the same song. It communicates such an instant feeling of joy to see all the characters, most dead, all miserable, suddenly laughing genuinely. My favorite part of the many, many times I’ve shown this movie to friends is this, when they’re expecting a conclusion, and get a complete dissolution of tension. The editors and the director definitely had a hand in it, but there’s someone else we haven’t considered.
Alright, last suspect for our mastermind. The heart of the film. Light Yagami, nay Turner. Nat Wolff (“Paper Towns”). Best known for the Disney Channel show “The Naked Brothers Band” and the film “The Fault in Our Stars,” he delivers a performance too petulant to be sympathetic but too serious to be openly mocked. In his greatest moments, like the climactic argument at the top of the Ferris wheel that closes the film, his voice breaks, and he takes an endearingly teenaged rhythm in his frantic speech. He approaches every confrontation like his parents have just grounded him. It draws attention to the character’s immaturity in a way that undercuts the film’s seriousness, calling to mind the kind of dork who’s just barely too cool to play Call of Duty. In doing so, Wolff eliminates the film’s chance at sympathetic characters, instead highlighting the spectacle of figuring out who this movie hates most, between childish Light, power-hungry Mia and incompetent L. This performance is also so overtly funny at points it calls into question, again, what this film is supposed to be: dark comedy or serious adaptation. Mastermind? Probably not. Potentially involved.
Is “Death Note” a deconstruction of the very processes that brought it into being? Through fascinatingly ironic performances, directing and editing just as likely to play a power ballad as they are to play score, cohesive aesthetic, dissonant writing? I am infinitely compelled. Was the voice crack at 1:19:48 scripted? Was it genuine stress for the character, a mockery of his childish nature? Or a mockery of the whole production? A foreshadowing of the falsetto in the coming song, perfectly cutting the tension, making you root against all these characters in and out of canon? I don’t know. I don’t know. It has to be genius. Orchestrated by one genius. If I could just figure out who.
Perhaps, though, it is something else entirely. A post-quality artifact. An ouroboros of terrible decisions, feeding into brilliant decisions, feeding into even worse decisions. No movie does anything to my brain like this one does. Maybe this is just the natural result of a lovingly made trainwreck. Is it secretly good? No. People work, and when they put their hearts into their work, you can feel it, even if the complete product is, let’s say, questionable in places. As all “secretly good” movies do, it presents a perfect cross-section of brilliance and tastelessness, passion and trash, style and bad decisions as far as the eye can see, blending like reality and unreality as the credits roll with dramatic music over bloopers of the cast.
Daily Arts Writer Holly Tsch can be reached at htsch@umich.edu.