Gozu (2003)
Directed by Takashi Miike
Minami mistakenly kills a gangster associate of his named Brother. Almost as soon as the murder takes place, the body of the deceased man is gone, prompting Minami to conduct a search. While looking, he finds a mysterious isolated hotel where he decides to take a rest. Not only are the front desk clerks a bit strange, but even the ambiance feels unusual. Minami soon realizes he may have gotten more than he bargained for.
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What critics compared Gozu to
The insane, unholy marriage of "Lost Highway," "Jules and Jim," and his own "Audition," claws its way into the droning odyssey and climaxes in a scene of rebirth that would make David Lynch's head spin.
It helps to be tolerant of excess as the auteur does a pretty fair job at creating a Japanese David Lynch movie, borrowing liberally from the American maestro’s works, “U-Turn” and “Lost Highway.”
Partly inspired by Lynch's "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive," "Gozu" trades Lynch's nightmare logic for exasperating incoherence.
Garland’s trademark opacity as writer-director is at its peak in Men , but the back half certainly delivers on visceral body horror – one sequence simultaneously evokes both Takashi Miike’s Gozu and Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves .
Takashi Miike got there first with his gonzo “Gozu,” wherein a woman gave birth to a full-size yakuza, but Garland escalates the freak factor in a major way.
It’s a daringly queer and undoubtedly controversial ride, resulting in a most uncommon monster movie — a cross between David Cronenberg’s “Crash” and the uterine horrors of Takashi Miike’s “Gozu,” perhaps — where the main character hardly ever speaks and what Ducournau is trying to say is wildly open to interpretation.
Whether the director of the creepy Audition (2000), the blood-spattered Ichi the Killer (2001), and the patently deranged musical The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) has raised or lowered the art-meets-gore standard is a subject that will debated by moviegoers who see Gozu � a large number, it�s to be hoped.
Miike may also be responding here to complaints about his warped gangster pictures Ichi the Killer (2001) and Graveyard of Honor (2002), in which Japan’s lionized master of extreme cinema violated the conventional boundaries between genres with lingering scenes of torture and arterial spew that would make sense only in a horror movie.
Miike�s love for the absurdly shocking lacks the seriousness and dexterity of Audition, and the comic ridiculousness of Ichi the Killer.
I haven’t had a lot of exposure to Takeshi Miike’s copious film catalog but have seen “Audition” and “Ichi the Killer,” at least.
His international reputation rests primarily on three films, two blood-sprayed yakuza masterpieces ("Dead or Alive" and the truly insane "Ichi the Killer") and "Audition," a seemingly Hitchcockian romantic thriller that utterly betrays its audience's goodwill with an unexpected atrocity so fierce it has to be seen to be believed.
The last two years have seen several of Miikes recent films, such as The Happiness of the Katakuris , Dead or Alive , and Ichi the Killer , meet their demand in the U.S.