(2003)
3.5
Josh Ralske
Takashi Miike is a master of body horror and squirm-inducing sexual weirdness, as he's taken many opportunities to demonstrate. He's also a filmmaker capable of great wit and the cogent dissemination of actual ideas. For those who can withstand the visceral terror of the torture scenes in Audition, there is the reward of seeing an intelligent filmmaker using and subverting genre filmmaking techniques to explore an ugly facet of his culture. Gozu has its memorable moments, certainly, and is not the off-the-wall barrage of weirdness for its own sake to which Miike's work occasionally descends. It doesn't quite cohere, and its story and tone owe too much to Oliver Stone's U-Turn and David Lynch's work, but Miike has a knack for tapping into deep-seated cultural anxieties, particularly male sexual anxiety, that few filmmakers can match. Gozu starts off as a goofily offbeat yakuza story. The buildup is actually less banal and more bizarrely eventful than the romantic drama trappings that set up Audition, and while the payoff is doesn't have the same brutal logic as in the earlier film, it is equal in the visceral way it sears itself into one's brain. There are odd bits and borrowings in Gozu, like the cue-card-reading woman and the yakuza boss' sexual obsession, and the bizarre relationship of the innkeeper and her brother, that could have been invented by some other filmmaker, but the climactic birth scene, perhaps the most disturbingly graphic in the history of cinema, is Miike's and Miike's alone.
Trailer
cast-crew for Gozu on AllMovie
Gozu (2003)
