Director: Akira Nagai

Cast: Yuki Yamada, Sairi Ito, Shota Sometani, Atsuro Watabe, Jiro Sato

Bakudan is a 2025 Japanese thriller directed by Akira Nagai, following a peculiar unemployed man who claims to predict bomb explosions through psychic visions — and whose ambiguous confessions drag a police investigation into an unsettling spiral of suspicion, riddles, and buried secrets.

What is Bakudan about?

When Suzuki shatters a vending machine in a drunken stupor, his arrest by the police seems routine — until he begins forecasting bomb blasts with uncanny accuracy. He insists his knowledge comes through supernatural clairvoyance, then reverses course, saying he was hypnotized and cannot account for what he knows. Rather than cooperating, he baits the detectives questioning him with cryptic clues wrapped in wordplay and contradictions. Senior detective Kiyomiya grows increasingly frustrated alongside his younger partner Ruike, as each revelation deepens the puzzle rather than solving it. A shadow from the past — a disgraced officer named Hasebe who died by suicide after a scandal — begins to surface in the investigation. The central question driving the film forward: is Suzuki a dangerous bomber hiding behind eccentricity, or is something far stranger at play?

Cast & crew

Director Akira Nagai helms this tightly wound psychological thriller with a cast built for moral ambiguity. Yuki Yamada plays the inscrutable Suzuki, matched against Atsuro Watabe as the tenacious senior detective Kiyomiya. Sairi Ito, Shota Sometani, Jiro Sato, Kanichiro, Ryota Bando, and Sennosuke Kataoka round out an ensemble that keeps the pressure at a sustained simmer throughout the film's 136-minute runtime.

Context & significance

Japanese crime thrillers have developed a devoted following among Persian-speaking viewers in the diaspora — the genre's emphasis on psychological tension, procedural precision, and morally complex characters resonates strongly with audiences who grew up on intricate Iranian detective dramas and Persian literature's tradition of the unreliable narrator. Bakudan, with its interrogation-room cat-and-mouse dynamic and its deliberately blurred line between victim and perpetrator, sits comfortably in that tradition. The film is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing, making it fully accessible without needing to follow subtitles — a rare convenience for a Japanese production of this scope.

Where & how to watch

Bakudan is available now on K-Time with both Persian dub and Persian subtitles. Stream it on your browser, smart TV, or Android device — no VPN required, no geo-blocking, no extra download. Subscribe once and cancel anytime.