In this exceptional adaptation of the hit Chinese series The Bad Kids—a Japanese Omen by way of Okinawa—three teenage beach buddies unwittingly open Pandora’s box when their camera accidentally captures, Zapruder-like, what appears to be damning evidence of a crime. Enter a fiendishly clever adolescent and his malevolent adult counterpart—two peas in a pitch-black pod whose unholy alliance soon weaves an ever-darkening web of corruption. Director Shusuke Kaneko (Death Note), no stranger to moral ambiguity, coils their fates together with a grandmaster’s touch, his visuals slithering between beauty and menace, his camera stalking each of the protagonists’ deplorable choices with a merciless, Hitchcockian gaze. As this grim game of cat-and-mouse spirals into Night Town, Gold Boy probes disquieting depths: the frailty of virtue, wisdom’s Faustian price, evil’s ubiquity. A richly diabolical dissertation on human fallibility cloaked in baroque mystery-thriller trappings, this subversive sleeper, like a Blow-Up recast as a moral apocalypse, leaves us pondering what darkness may lurk within.