BLACK KISS opens with the murder of a womanizing modeling agent and the disappearance of the model he has shacked up with in a sleazy red light district hotel (only a severed finger is left behind). Then we go back a few days and meet naive new model Asuka (Reika Hashimoto) looking for a place to stay. A fellow model introduces her to cynical ex-model Kasumi (Kaori Kawamura) whose previous two boyfriends committed suicide and whose eccentric artist friend/roommate Mari has recently disappeared. Receiving a less than warm welcome, Asuka moves into Kasumi's red light district apartment. One stormy night, she hears a man's screams and witnesses a woman in black mutilating a man through the window of the hotel across the street (the opening murder). The dead man, whose body has been dissected and arranged like a bizarre sculpture, turns out to have been a former employer of Kasumi who had been harassing her. As more rivals and friends of Kasumi meet grisly deaths, she and Asuka become closer. Asuka recognizes a photograph of Mari as the murderer but Mari is discovered to have been a victim of the killer prior to the killing she witnessed yet Mari turns up in the background of a photograph taken on the night of the murder. The police start to wonder if the killer of Kasumi's sister who hung himself in prison and her two boyfriends who committed suicide could have been previous victims of the killer and whether someone is trying to frame Kasumi or possess her.

A cross between a Dario Argento thriller, an eighties giallo (like NOTHING UNDERNEATH) and SE7EN, the film is stunning to look at and the film is suspenseful and compelling up until the less-than-satisfying ending (motivated by the director wanting to defy serial killer film conventions). Though it compares poorly to the somewhat similarly-themed Korean thriller TELL ME SOMETHING, the film reflexively pokes at itself and other similar thrillers with remarks about how contrived and deliberately planned the seemingly random killings and series of red herrings really are. Unlike the serial killer films - but like Giallo films focused on the prurient aspects of the fashion world - the police procedural scenes provide mainly expository plot info that the suspects and victims are not going to fess up and are rife with more red herrings than the scenes involving the suspects - including a tangent involving a criminologist with an interest in voodoo who only provides a previously available profile on the killer that no one else bothered to look for only after he has himself become a suspect (having also been present in the crime scene photograph along with Mari). The cinematography is excellent although it seems more like a color-gelled version of SE7EN's aesthetics than that of a Dario Argento film. The killings are grisly but the onscreen carnage is thankfully restrained.