Shumchi Nagasaki, (whose chilling Super-8 feature. Heart Beating in the Dark, screened at MFF 88) has been described as the 'Japanese Chabrol'. He shares with the French filmmaker a preference for crime stories with a psychological bent, as well as an inconspicuous style: no large signs only minimal gestures. Eerie and unsettling, this thriller makes much of seemimgly little but, like the crime it depicts, refuses to leave the viewer in peace.

A young woman, desperate to save both her affair with a married man and the small business enterprise that she runs with him, resorts to a kidnap-and-ransom scheme, to raise urgently needed money.

Though working within the milieu of murder, The Drive is, above all, a moving portrait of a woman who desperately resists approaching loneliness. She clings onto the man as a drowning person clings onto a piece of wood.