I've long been lamenting the fact that Japanese director Takashi Miike's unyielding output is so overwhelming that it's futile business, keeping up here in the West where only one out of like every ten of his movies makes their way over. He's got 124 credits on his resume since 1991, which works out to be about three and a half projects (be they movies or T.V. or short films) every single year. He's like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, only alive. Also as as aside I also find it exciting that his next two projects are a Japanese version of the
Bad Lietenant movies starring the gorgeous
Shun Oguri...
... which is already in the can, and then, filming right now apparently, is
a new horror movie starring Charli XCX! That's absolutely wild. But also that's not why we're here -- we're here because in a weird coincidence I ended up watching two Takashi Miike movies this past weekend without meaning to, and I wanted to direct you to one of them. The first one many of you have probably already seen before -- that was 2003's J-horror classic
One Missed Call, which I watched because our pal Stacie Ponder of
Final Girl fame had just talked it on the podcast
The Evolution of Horror. That movie needs no talking up from me; it's a well-known blast. The second movie, though, that one I'd pre-ordered a blu-ray of ages ago and randomly pulled off my pile of movies to watch yesterday morning without even realizing it was a Miike movie until the end credits.
That movie was 2014's
Over Your Dead Body, which just got
a gorgeous release from the fine folks at 88 Films (although it's a Region B disc so only consider buying it if you've got a region-free blu-ray player; I can't speak to the quality of
the U.S. blu-ray but that exists as well). Amazingly though I had never heard of this film when it came out, nor in the decade since then, and I'm genuinely bummed about that because I would've been singing its praises all these many years. It immediately became a top-tier Miike fave. Twisty and intelligent and sticky and meta as hell, it reminded me of everything from
Kwaidan to
Wes Craven's New Nightmare to
Synecdoche New York and
Drive My Car -- I thought it was a total stunner.
The film tells the tale of a theatrical company practicing their upcoming stage version of Yotsuya Kaidan, aka the most famous and influential Japanese ghost story of them all. A good majority of the film takes place inside the warehouse-like theater, with the actors on the stage often mingling with the behind-the-scenes technicians -- the film keeps switching between us watching the play being performed and their performances being filmed like a movie, so the audience disappears -- Miike keeps blurring slash erasing the lines between what's real and what's fake in gorgeously disorienting ways. (In that way it reminded me of the purposeful artifice of his wackadoo gay western Sukiyaki Western Django from 2007, which always felt more like a spin on Querelle than it did the Django in its title).
Anyway all of that's before you even get into the ways the actors' lives are intertwining with the story they're telling. If you're unaware
Yotsuya Kaidan tells the story of a married samurai who wants to ditch his wife for a richer younger girl, and he gets some diabolical assitance in so doing thanks to his prospective in-laws, who're only too happy to poison the old wife so they can have a samurai for a son-in-law. Well as the actors are reenacting this story on the stage the leading man, who's partnered with his leading lady in real life, starts having an affair with his wife's stand-in. And let's just say the stand-in makes Nomi in
Showgirls and Eve in
All About Eve look like the pictures of sanity.
Calling this Miike's All About Eve is very much on point, though. One of my favorite moments in the film comes early on, when during a break one of the male actors admits to one of the female actors that he wishes that they could all live inside of the play -- pointedly this immediately follows them staging scenes where women are being treated like whores and chattel, abused and berated. The woman, a little stunned, says she's uhhh not so keen on that specific idea thank you very much. But that moment really gets to the film's thesis, I think -- it's about Japanese men (or you know, all straight men) romanticizing the patriarchy where they once had all the power; indeed the movie extends that to why stories like Yotsuya Kaidan keep getting told over and over and over again. It's about a neverending ritualization of the fantasy of abuse.
Of course Yotsuya Kaidan isn't that simple, given it's a ghost story where the wronged woman is able to enact some vengeance, and the ways in which Miike twists his meta narrative to his will are pretty delightful. And I don't want to spoil much more on it than I have already, so I'll stop here -- all I say is seek this movie out if you've never seen it. It's definitely a slow-burn and one of Miike's more subtle works... although using the word "subtle" given the number of decapitations on display does make me chuckle. Takashi Miike being subtle doesn't mean there won't be a ton of blood-spray!
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