Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill is a visual triumph. To evoke the lonely milieu inhabited by a professional killer, the film’s production designer, Sukezo Kawahara, created a harshly dynamic world of sharp angles and muted tones. “I decided to pursue the coldness of that peculiar realm of society,” Kawahara wrote in a statement explaining his approach to the film, released after he won the Cinematography Incentive Award from the Art Directors Guild of Japan for his work on it. “To do so, I eliminated all trace of warmth from every set (choosing location sites with that premise in mind) and based the set design on straight lines and nonright angles (especially acute angles), using a chiaroscuro color scheme of white, black, gray, and silver.”