Aku no Hana (2026)

I was probably not the right audience for it

This drama is a live adaptation from the manga of the same name from Oshimi Shuzo. His work has apparently been adapted several times but this is my first contact with his story. I had no prior knowledge on it and I can't say if it is a good adaptation or not, however it has for sure the feels of a manga, and it is pretty dark and disturbing. The hero of the story, Kasuga Takao, is a middle school teenager, feeling suffocated by the remote city he lives in, surrounded by moutains. He hates everything about it and build a quite disturbing relationship with Nakamura Sawa, a girl from his class, who shares the same feeling of rejection about the place they live in.

I overall quite liked some of the more psychological aspect of the story but there is also a big part of over-the-top fetishization, which can feel quite jarring. It is also funny how the male lead, seem to have such a strong appeal for the female characters he met along his journey. This might be the most unrealistic part of the story, very in line with the harem shounen manga, with the "hero" being quite a "looser" but attracting girls almost "in spite of him".

Regarding the acting, it was overall too over-the-top, with some scenes feeling very grotesque. The cast felt also a bit strange : they are supposedly playing middle schoolers but it definitely don't feel like it. The actor playing the hero might have been the best at it (despite certainly seeming much older than the role) but the actresses felt kind of awkward at time. On the positive, the production value was good with some impactful and memorable sequences which I imagine strikingly mirror the higher beats of the manga.

I would recommend this to people looking for an impactful thriller, featuring adolscent turmoil. Overall, I did find some aspects disturbing, some others quite fascinating as it explores darker psychological aspects of teens, rejecting society. But at the end, I don't think I ever enjoyed the story per se, every character feeling pretty unlikeable and unrelatable to me. Though I was not necesserally receptive to the main's characters journey, I can understand the appeal, as it is a big fuck off to societal norms and the need to free oneself from it.

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