Visitor Q (2001)

Visitor Q (2001) Directed by Takashi Miike

There is something oddly mesmerizing about the scandalously inflammatory behavior adopted with disquieting irony by this ode to moral degeneracy that is unpleasantly accurate in its digital reproduction of the crumbling – and then reconstitution – of intimate institutional family values through a remorseless iconoclastic assault on these sacrosanct tenets. From the seclusion of the domestic compound, dedicated Japanese provocateur Takashi Miike disrupts the immoral benchmarks inhabiting his filmmaking and pushes them to immeasurable extremes with this tasteless film about tastelessness. Have you ever done it with your dad? With this twisted question Miike’s sickest film prefaces the wicked drama about a dysfunctional family engaging in incest, necrophilia, rape, homicidal bullying, heroin and prostitution, and the subplots are pretty much lactating nipple stimulation, deranged videographic voyeurism, gross-out rigor mortis sex and a mysterious man – Visitor Q – playing the role of an unorthodox savior by meddling in the sleazy family dynamics of these unholy interrelationships to restore their unity through an acceptance of their guilty debauchery. A sort of artless, porno Pasolini’s Teorema. Feel free to say whatever you want about this miserable, soulless, ambiguous truculent foray into the romanticized incarnation of impropriety, but the offhand comic irreverence of the awful goings-on signals in every thick minute of lengthy indecency that Takashi Miike got it right in parodying, deconstructing human depravity via the ugliness of digital kinetics. And the last few very weird minutes of farcical bliss might not be the finest thing Miike has ever done, but they are the best fucked-up prank the director has ever pulled on his dumbfounded viewers.