Logline In a race against time, a young female detective struggles with her old school male partner to solve the murders made by the Ikiryo, the ghost of vengeance, but she is unknowingly part of the mysterious deaths.
This female-driven thriller goes right to the last line of the screenplay and uses a minimum amount of special effects. The Ikiryo is loosely based on the ancient Japanese folklore of the spirit of a living person who travels to fatally avenge a wrong. Our protagonist is the youngest policeman ever promoted to detective, which makes this a type of coming-of-age story. Leslie Tate, our protagonist, empowers the female Millenials and Gen Z in style, conflicts, and culture. Add the paranormal, and this is a hit for all ages, as it's like Lethal Weapon meeting Netflix's Wednesday.
Synopsis
The Ikiryo works in any city with a Japanese neighborhood. Our protagonist is Leslie La Duca, a 30-year-old adopted Japanese-American female and one of the youngest police officers ever promoted to detective. Adopted by an Italian cop and his wife, she describes herself as an Italian-American in a Japanese wrapper. Her partner in this odd-couple relationship is Ed O'Malley, an old-school Irish detective approaching retirement. These two detectives are assigned a murder case where the female witness says the ghost of her lover's wife wore a Hanya mask and killed him by driving a spike through a straw doll and into his heart while they were in bed together. The problem is the wife isn't dead and is 1500 miles away. There are Japanese relics left at the crime scene.
La Duca will use her online Japanese teenage friend, Yuta, to help her solve this murder. Yuta tells her it is an Ikiryo, a ghost of a living person summoned to kill someone who has deceived you. O'Malley uses his old partner, now retired Red, to help with this case. Red shares that they had something similar when he first came on the force, and they framed a poor Haitian guy as they thought it was voodoo.
Then there is a second Ikiryo murder of a cheating husband, and the detectives found a link that both widows were in touch with Madame Miko Anmyodo on the days leading up to the murders. Madame Miko, our antagonist, is an old Japanese female fortune teller, shaman, and spiritual advisor. La Duca wants to see Madame Miko, but O'Malley can't go to the Little Tokyo section of the city because his old partner, Red, had killed a Geisha girl, and O'Malley bailed him out. They decided that Mitchell, Red's son, a uniform cop, would go undercover with La Duca. At this meeting, Madame Miko predicts Mitchell will face a tragic death and that La Duca is the chosen one in the lineage of Empress Jito to become a shaman, with the proof being the tattoo on La Duca's inner thigh.
It was Madame Miko's daughter that Red killed many years ago. Madame Miko summons her Ikiryo to kill Mitchell in retribution for his father's murder of her daughter, the Geisha girl. La Duca and O'Malley are at their lowest point after Mitchell's death. Still, it causes La Duca to realize that Yuta was the informer who gave both personal and police business information to Madame Miko. Yuta tries to convince La Duca that he thought she would merely scare Mitchell, not kill him. Yuta then tells La Duca that Madame Miko will use La Duca's body as a vessel for her spirit so that she can live on through her.
The two then plan to counter Madame Miko by summoning La Duca's Ikiryo to kill Madame Miko before she can enter La Duca's body. The climax is a race against time to see which living ghost of vengeance or Ikiryo will succeed first. Is it La Duca's, which means Madame Miko is dead, or is it Madame Miko's, and she has taken over La Duca's body? In the last scene, we are still determining who won. Yuta is nervous and scared because both Miko and La Duca are mad at him for helping the other. O'Malley breaks down the door to try to save La Duca, and when he sees La Duca, he looks into her eyes and says their code phrase, "Leave the gun."
The story can leave it up to the audience who survived by ending with just La Duca giving a Cheshire Cat smile.
Or, after the smile, the screen goes to black, but we then hear La Duca finish the code phrase that her father used to use from the Godfather movie, "Take the cannolis." Thus proving that La Duca survived.