YOGISHA (THE SUSPECT) Asian New Classics

When you’re a cop in Tokyo, office politics are more deadly than the yakuza. That bitter truth becomes apparent when Chief Inspector Shinji Muroi (Tashiro Yanagiba) re-opens a controversial murder case.

Muroi doesn’t believe that the young policeman accused of the crime is guilty. His superiors, the Metro Police Chief and the Fed’s Deputy Commissioner, are each using the case to advance their own careers and don’t like Muroi’s interference. Stoic and stubborn, Muroi finds himself arrested on a trumped-up charge and is soon fighting the battle of his life, pitted against a malevolent law firm and the Byzantine machinations of police bureaucrats. His only ally is a police-hating defense attorney.

Spun off from the wildly popular BAYSIDE SHAKEDOWN television series and films, and already a box-office smash in Japan, THE SUSPECT stands on its own as a tension-filled character study that questions whether the law stands in the way of true justice, even as it unravels an absorbing murder mystery.