L DK starts with Aoi (Ayame Goriki) confronting campus heartthrob Shuusei (Kento Yamazaki) about rejecting her best friend Moe. In a fit of anger, she accidentally pushes him down the stairs. She ends up helping him get home, which turns out to be a room in the same boarding house in which she lives. While trying to cook him a meal, she accidentally sets a fire, setting off a sprinkler and ruining the room. Aoi reluctantly agrees to let Shuusei stay with her in her room. And while he continues to rub her the wrong way, as she spends more time with him, she develops feelings for the young man.
So: an average schoolgirl ends up secretly living with the hottest guy in school. He treats her badly, but occasionally shows hidden depths. She slowly falls in love with him, and gets her hopes up that they can be together. But he’s got some emotional baggage that keeps him from taking the plunge. And so continues to treat her badly. In the film, this is presented as some sort of romantic fantasy, with the characters all too willing to forgive Shuusei for all the terrible things he does for the sake of pursuing a vague idea of true love.
What is actually being presented on screen looks a lot like an abusive relationship. There is actually a scene in here where Shuusei literally pushes Aoi down a hill. He rolls after her, and explains to her that he thought it would make her laugh. Aoi, inexplicably, accepts this explanation and laughs along with him. This scene is presumably meant to cute, but it is horrifying. It feels like watching a character develop Stockholm Syndrome, Aoi losing all of her agency as she continues to consent to being abused.
And this all takes far too long to happen, the film trudging through a plot that lacks incident. There just isn’t much at stake in all this. The story starts out by hinting that the two could get in trouble if people found out that they were living together, even given the unique circumstances. But that never actually becomes an issue. So much of the film is much ado about nothing, the characters acting like everything is the end of the world, even when nothing is actually happening. There is a sequence in here where Aoi is trying to hide from girls who think she’s Shuusei’s girlfriend. The film makes this out to be some sort of dangerous event, but it doesn’t make any sense at all.
The film’s technical package isn’t very good, either. At best, the film looks like a TV movie, with really flat compositions and a distinct lack of any cinematic touches. The editing is far too loose, making the film feel even longer than it actually is. The actors all seem to be trying very hard to look like cartoons, mugging for the camera in their reaction shots. It doesn’t at all feel natural. The Tagalog dubbing is pretty standard. The tone and the energy do seem to match what’s being shown on screen. That’s good, even though what’s being shown on screen is actually pretty bad.
L DK is based on a hit manga. This tells me that Japan is actually closer to us than I previously, because this film looks a lot like some of the worse Wattpad adaptations. It features all of the same elements, up to and including the third act bid for emotional gravity that almost never works out. L DK is one of these new romances that aren’t very romantic at all. They’re just stories of girls accepting abuse from terrible guys, hoping that they might some day turn out to be decent. That’s not okay. That’s never okay.
My Rating:
