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Review

After directing one of his most mainstream films, One Missed Call, Japan’s ultra-prolific Takashi Miike apparently felt the need to reassert his cinematic individualism. The result, Izo, is – by a considerable margin – Miike’s most experimental and anarchic work to date…and if you know Miike, you know how significant that statement is. Izo is a radical exploration of mankind’s destructive urges in the form of a (heavily non-narrative) time-travel odyssey: it’s the world’s first existentialist-cum-nihilist samurai splatter epic. The “story” follows Izo, a 19th-century samurai who travels through time to the present day (though time is a meaninglessly fluid concept here), with just one goal: to destroy every human being on earth. The definition of negative energy made flesh, Izo transforms into a literal demon as his body count, spread over several centuries, makes Ichi the Killer look like a Quaker drama; eventually, not long after Izo dispatches the prime minister (“Beat” Takeshi Kitano, in one of several Japanese celebrity appearances), the film descends into hell. And let’s not even get into the talking flowers, the folk singer who materializes to serve as ongoing Greek chorus, or the schoolchildren who lecture on the hypocrisies of society while Izo slaughters their demonic mothers in the hallway just outside. Miike discards even the pretense of genre structure, delivering his own personal El Topo-styled hallucinatory head trip about the ills of Japanese society and humanity’s propensity for violence.

 -- Travis Crawford