(2007)
Josh Ralske
Sion Sono's EXTE: Hair Extensions is a bizarre and delightfully comic freakout of a horror movie satire. Sono takes the J-horror trope of the female ghost with the long, black hair to its comic extreme that is equal parts disturbing, creepy, sad, funny, and just plain weird. Often it is all of those things simultaneously. Sono may be parodying the proliferation of hair-based horrors, but he also understands their power. He captures the beauty and the strangeness of human hair and his culture's obsession with it. While Ren Osugi, as dangerous hair fetishist Gunji Yamazaki, provides much of the film's weirdness quotient with a gleefully deranged, over-the-top performance featuring a musical tribute to his favorite hair-spewing corpse, Chiaki Kuriyama grounds the picture emotionally with a winning turn as Yuko, the bright-eyed young hairstylist. From the film's opening, as she playfully narrates her rather mundane daily life to an imaginary camera, Yuko is impossible not to root for. Sono captures such a vulnerability in Kuriyama, from her sweetly cheerful demeanor to her prominent proboscis, that makes the intrusions of her rotten sister Kiyomi (Tsugumi and the demented Yamazaki seem a true violation. The scares here are genuine. In one nearly unbearably tactile scene, a hairdresser wearing the Yamazaki's extensions is possessed by the spirit of the dead woman while cutting a customer's hair, scissors feinting again and again at the woman's vulnerable ears. In another scene, a hapless salon employee takes the extensions home and finds hair starting to flow from every orifice. This is the kind of uniquely visceral horror that lingers in one's memory, and the genuine miseries of child abuse, alienation, and obsession underlying Sono's film only add to its unusual resonance.
Exte on AllMovie
Exte (2007)
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