Visitor Q (2001)
[dir: Takashi Miike; writer: Itaru Era]
Cast: Kenichi Endo ( Kiyoshi Yamazaki/Father), Fujiko (I) (Miki Yamazaki/Daughter), Jun Muto (Takuya Yamazaki/Son), Shoko Nakahara (Asako Murata), Ikko Suzuki (Sasaoka), Shungiku Uchida (Keiko Yamazaki/Mother), Kazushi Watanabe (The visitor)
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Nut-case director Takashi Miike has done it again, taking every tool of regular moviemaking and throwing it out–presumably into a pile on his front lawn, where he pours gasoline over the whole mess and sets it on fire. Story-logic, character, and visual aesthetics all get the boot in ‚ÄúVisitor Q,‚Äù Miike’s latest exercise in free-associative lunacy. This time, Miike’s target is the Japanese nuclear family. What HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS was to THE SOUND OF MUSIC, what ICHI THE KILLER was to THE GODFATHER, VISITOR Q is to ‚ÄúThe Cosbys.‚Äù The nuclear family gets blown through the roof.
Shot digitally for an already-infamous film series entitled LOVE GENERATION, VISITOR Q is determined to fly in the face of decency as loudly and rudely as possible. Miike seems to be pushing the envelope in an ever-escalating trajectory. It’s the kind of film that starts with incest and culminates in necrophilia. Along the way we get treated to the further degradation and rapid deterioration of our model family, all of whose members get individually involved in increasingly perverse behavior.
Points and meanings behind Takashi Miike movies tend to be vague or warped, trampled-over or just flat-out missing, and VISITOR Q is no exception. It probably means nothing. In spite of that, the movie draws one in a way that is all its own–the evolution of the picture’s perversity becomes, like the best of train wrecks, like the most spectacular burstings of damns and suppurating of wounds, fascinating to behold. The LOVE GENERATION of Miike’s movies is anti-love, anti-politically-correct, anti-everything that most of us erstwhile consumers hold to be important. It’s a movie that spits venom and bile in the most lusty, stylish way possible.
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