Sion Sono
Arthouse Japanese film-maker that deals often with extreme subjects and horror, which he delivers in a relatively deeper, surreal or more thoughtful package. His movies vary widely and unpredictably from extreme horror to arthouse drama, action, gore, twisted entertainment or any other genre you can think of. I like to think of him at times as the arthouse version of Takashi Miike and much less whimsical, and therefore more interesting and challenging. He is most well known for Suicide Club, and he has since then evaded pigeon-holing with a wide variety of movies, including a silly horror movie about evil hair extensions (a statement on the overused long-haired-girl in Japanese horror?).
A Japanese salad of art cinema, black-humor, horror, detective story, morality tale, and gore. People all over Japan are mysteriously committing suicide, 54 schoolgirls jump in front of a train in a huge splash of gore, wives cut themselves up, high school kids jump off roofs, etc. Detectives try to track down the cause of this phenomenon to no avail as only more mysteries pop up: Sport bags full of stitched pieces of human skin, anonymous kids on the phone spouting existential mumbo-jumbo, web-sites counting the suicides, a transvestite rock star who kicks animals to death in bowling alleys, and more. An interesting, bizarre, existential exploration of a (Japanese) society that has lost its individual identity, pop-culture sweeping people into losing themselves, teenagers and adults who mistakenly define themselves by their connection to other people and objects, and empty, dead people who only live through peer pressure, all thus comitting suicide. This works best when viewed as a metaphysical horror movie in the vein of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Followed by the unnecessary Noriko's Dinner Table, an artsy, overlong but mostly conventional drama focusing on identity through family and emotion, featuring 'families for hire' but over-explaining everything to death with voice-overs.
I see this is a psychological horror movie that lies somewhere between the dark human depths, desperate violence and depravity of a Gaspar Noé movie, and the exploitative grindhouse gore and pointless nastiness of a Miike film, but it belongs in neither category. A meek and morose pet-fish-salesman is stuck in a bad marriage with a bratty nightmare of a teenage daughter and an unhappy, pretty and selfish wife. When he meets an aggressively cheerful and pushy rival businessman who rescues his daughter from an arrest, the man takes over their life, and in no time at all he is suggesting business partnerships, adopting the daughter for his store, seducing then abusing the wife into sexual submission, and involving the meek husband in murder and criminal deals, complete with a systematic butchery of body parts to make the victim 'become invisible'. Matters turn worse and worse, the meek man pushed beyond his boundaries like Sumner in Straw Dogs resulting in a climax of violence, gore and rape that must be seen to be believed.
Sion Sono does a 4 hour crazy Miike flick with some underlying depth. Try to follow this plot: A son of a priest turns to sin and increasingly sinful confessions in order to please his father's guilt after an affair with a crazy woman. He learns to become a panty-peek photography kung-fu master and falls for a man-hating girl while in a Lady Scorpion costume and makes her into his Virgin Mary. A penis-chopping abused woman working as a recruitment officer for a cult, manipulates their lives and messes them up even further as she spies on them and shoe-horns herself into their lives. Lots of melodrama, teenage-chic craziness, panty-fu, girls beating up men, religious nihilism and love triangle drama ensue, with equal parts satirical catharsis and warped mania, including sympathy for the perverts and spiritual hard-ons. A one-of-a-kind entertaining but warped experience.
A surreal blend of Lynchian warped and repulsive characters with over-the-top Guignol grotesqueries and a narrative that schizophrenically melds realities before pulling a plot twist and turning them all inside out. Sion Sono of Suicide Circle fame masterfully crafts a nightmare with interesting cinematography but covers a pointlessly twisted story. In one reality, a girl is forced to watch her parents having sex through a cello-case before being raped by her father, her identity instantly confused with her mother's in heavy-handed Freudian fashion as her rape is braided together with her mother's lust, with guilt and jealousy messing everything up even further. In another reality, a freaky female author in a wheelchair is writing about these happenings while keeping a strange cello-case in her grotesquely decorated house. The schizophrenia is further enhanced by surreal nightmares, visions of a strange circus and a guillotine, walls covered in blood, and more. A unique, well-crafted but pointless movie that also could have used more subtlety and atmosphere.