Aarcflick

 After watching *As You Stood By*, I discovered it's inspired by a Japanese drama, which was itself based on a novel. The first thing that puzzled me was why the posters for the Japanese drama showed women shirtless for no apparent reason. If the original work doesn't take the subject seriously, why should the remake? But of course, they say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and since I haven't seen *Naomi and Kanako* since 2016, I'm not going to try to explain what it's about. I don't know if the problem lies with the original work itself, or if this moral dilemma about what a woman should do when she's being slowly beaten to death is simply too difficult to portray. I don't think this is something we see in thrillers aimed at men; even if a woman is forced to use violence, she ends up being punished ruthlessly for it. I think the real problem here is that *As You Stood By* falls somewhere between realism and a fantasy world. For a while, you...