Cover Art

Credits

Director: Takashi Miike Stars: Hideki Sone, Sho Aikawa, Kimika Yoshino, Shohei Hino, Keiko Tomita, Harumi Sone, Renji Ishibashi Screenplay: Sakichi Sato Country: Japan

The back cover of Siren's Region 4 edition of this totally bizarre, if not utterly unfathomable film has a quote from the BBC's Jamie Russell: "To say Gozu steps beyond the bounds of sanity is rather like saying that Jeffrey Dahmer had unusual dietary habits." I really couldn't put it better myself.

While we all know Miike has a reputation for the perverse, the unexpected and the, at time, utterly deranged (fuck off - go and watch Visitor Q, The Happiness of the Katakuris, Fudoh: The Next Generation and Ichi the Killer and then get back to me – you back? Good. Let's go to work.), Gozu (literal translation: cow-head) takes us into a surreal nightmare via David Lynch's stranger and more wilfully absurd (and at times blackly funny) moments.

The plot is deceptively simple: Minami, a small cog in the big yakuza machine, is given an order he's not too keen on: kill his boss and friend Ozaki, and dispose of the body. Now, Minami's not a bad fella, and is understandably not too keen on doing so, But orders are orders, and so, conflicted by his sense of where his loyalties lie, off he goes. Mind you, his boss has been acting awfully strangely of late… His blackly hilarious, ludicrous, brutal and disturbing (not to mention rather "hands on") slaying of a Chihuahua he's identified as an attack dog trained to kill yakuza "made men" at the beginning of the film is a prime example of his weirdness, and a laugh out loud moment of Miike brilliance.

Minami drives Ozaki out to Nagoya, in the country, ostensibly to take care of business, but things don't really go to plan and Ozaki goes missing. Minami searches for him desperately through a town that makes Twin Peaks look like Pleasantville, and things take a left hand turn into the practically demented; not in the Visitor Q style, but much like Mulholland Drive – questioning what's going on in terms of actual levels of reality – is what we are seeing actually happening? Or is it Minami's subjective perspective on the events, given the heightened sense of paranoia and claustrophobia he feels engendered by his betrayal (or possibly not) of Ozaki?

This is a film I don't want to give away too much of. Sometimes it drifts into the whole "weirdness for weirdness' sake" vibe, at others it is quite seriously addressing notions of how people can't communicate any more (of how language is inadequate in doing so), of loyalty and distrust, of redemption, identity, sexuality, duty and friendship, as well as the inability of spirituality to provide answers, the lack of personal connection and notions of re-birth. There's a similar dichotomy in the violence – at times brutal and horrific, at others, Three Stooges-style slapstick (at others, both) – the laughs are sometimes very guilty ones indeed.

Miike's usual visual flair is all over this film like a rash. It looks fantastic, but the narrative (or what passes for it) moves at a snail's pace. Like other visually enticing yet almost plotless films (Eraserhead, El Topo and Begotten all spring pretty readily to mind), you can experience this film, but not necessarily engage with it.

And, as always, Miike throws in the weird shit – sometimes, I think – purposefully for the sole purpose of making his audience say to themselves, "What the fuck?!" Examples: a yakuza boss who screws his missus with a soup ladle wedged firmly up his arse, male-to-female and female-to-male transvestites, an enigmatic man with a lack of facial pigment (who when we first meet him appears to be reading porno films in the middle of a paddock), a lactating landlady, and of course, a drooling bull-headed (literally!) man in y-fronts. Oh, and the worst case of Cleopatra-grip I've ever seen – yeeesh!