Visitor Q is another excellent experiment by Takashi Miike to see if he can get his crew to quit, his audience to leave the theatre, and people to be offended to the point of non-completion of the movie. However, it was completed, just like the dozens of other Miike movies, and just like Ichi the Killer, Gozu, Audition, and other thrillers, the overall extremes of the movie are bounded together by a relentless imagination and a whimsical logic. This movie, like Audition, is billed often as a horror movie, but like Dead or Alive, what seems to be going in one direction actually becomes something completely different by the time the movie ends.
There is literally a line where the scenes of this movie get so extreme that they cease to be horrifying and instead become hilarious. Another example of Miike's skill is that he knows exactly where that line is, and at that point the direction lets the movie become more comedic as well. There is no better perverse pleasure than watching a married couple smiling and connecting after years of dysfunction as they hack apart a corpse together... especially following everything that's happened previously, which includes but is not limited to necrophilia, coprophilia, copious milk spraying, and random violence. You know, usual Miike fair.
This movie has its significance, as well. Miike has definitely tapped into the Japanese anxiety over traditionalism versus modernism, a conflict that can be found through almost the entire history of Japanese cinema (for a good discussion of this, see Donald Richie's "One Hundred Years of Japanese Film"). Miike's feelings are, like the best of Japanese filmmakers, ambivalent and assimilated. A stated theme of the movie in dialog is that Japan is falling apart because the traditional family is falling apart... yet that family comes back together through some of the most perverse acts ever recorded and distributed (besides Italian Giallo films, but this is better).
I have seen something like a dozen Miike films by now--the man produces them faster than I can watch them. It's a very rare filmmaker that continues to impress through so many movies. As long as he keeps it up, I'm going to keep watching them... and as long as he maintains his abject sensibilities, his lack of self-censorship, and his constant explorations of extremes, he'll continue to make classics.
--PolarisDiB
There is literally a line where the scenes of this movie get so extreme that they cease to be horrifying and instead become hilarious. Another example of Miike's skill is that he knows exactly where that line is, and at that point the direction lets the movie become more comedic as well. There is no better perverse pleasure than watching a married couple smiling and connecting after years of dysfunction as they hack apart a corpse together... especially following everything that's happened previously, which includes but is not limited to necrophilia, coprophilia, copious milk spraying, and random violence. You know, usual Miike fair.
This movie has its significance, as well. Miike has definitely tapped into the Japanese anxiety over traditionalism versus modernism, a conflict that can be found through almost the entire history of Japanese cinema (for a good discussion of this, see Donald Richie's "One Hundred Years of Japanese Film"). Miike's feelings are, like the best of Japanese filmmakers, ambivalent and assimilated. A stated theme of the movie in dialog is that Japan is falling apart because the traditional family is falling apart... yet that family comes back together through some of the most perverse acts ever recorded and distributed (besides Italian Giallo films, but this is better).
I have seen something like a dozen Miike films by now--the man produces them faster than I can watch them. It's a very rare filmmaker that continues to impress through so many movies. As long as he keeps it up, I'm going to keep watching them... and as long as he maintains his abject sensibilities, his lack of self-censorship, and his constant explorations of extremes, he'll continue to make classics.
--PolarisDiB