Mariko is tending a small bar in Shinjuku, serving a variety of people from Kabukicho. Some of them are hostess who is obsessed with a nightclub guy or even twin sisters covertly act as contract killer. On a sideline, Mariko is working as a detective and one day the FBI visits her to ask for a secret investigation to search for an alien. When she embarks on it with help from her aides, she never knows that it will end up with confronting her tragic past.

Mariko, a bartender at Karl Mohl, a small bar with a loyal following, also runs a detective agency. One day she gets a call from the FBI. They want her to find a captured alien and a missing scientist. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a standard comic sci-fi thriller, as the two genre geniuses, whose filmography reminds me of a professional wrestling heel combo, seem determined to shatter “the clumsy female detective narrative” that relies on screaming and leaning on anyone. Ayaka is a hostess obsessed with the love of her host. Shigemi, who worries that her sister, who works as public official and tends to get hooked easily by her hopeless former yakuza lover, Tosuka, who works as a love hotel cleaner while waiting for his runaway daughter, while Masaya is a docile Iga-ryu Ninja. They all seem pathetic characters with secrets of their own, in a story told through the maze of neon-lit alleyways of a kabukicho, with the ultimate kitsch sensibility. (HONG Sanghyun)