First Love
- kinetic
- extreme
Neutral, breathless, extreme crime / yakuza, inventive in texture. Ambivalent, mid-stakes, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →One night in Tokyo, Leo, a young boxer, meets his first love, Monica, an imprisoned sex worker. Caught up in a drug-smuggling scheme, they find themselves pursued by a corrupt cop, a yakuza, his nemesis, and a female assassin.
Our read · First Love (2019) reads as a neutral, breathless, inventive crime · yakuza · romance entry — extreme in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
Availability in the UK · via JustWatch
More info & search links
The shape of First Love
What watching it is actually like.
“You want Miike's Tokyo romance—boxing, yakuza chaos, youthful love amid violence.”
Skip it tonight — You can't stomach cartoonish gangster gore mixed with earnest romance.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself