It's no secret that most, if not all, of the best horror films being made today are being made not in Hollywood but overseas: namely Asia. Stories not about ghosts, but about the simplest of acts, are being told with horrific overtones, and this is one of the best.
Real horror is not about the actual confrontation between the hero/heroine and the monster in the attic, but about the anticipation leading to that encounter where we see an impending sense of wrongness, of something terrible lurking just around the corner that may have an equally horrible gift in tow.
Takashi Miike, the true star and ringleader of this disturbing foray into terror, brings us a (deceptively simple) set-up about a TV producer, Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), who is looking for a bride by the use of an ruse: an "audition" for a "film." (It all has the lighthearted tone of a romantic comedy of manners, depicting sexual attitudes in a totally different culture.) Once he settles for a shy girl dressed in complete, virginal white, Asami, (Eihi Shiina), the stage is set for their subsequent meetings as he is drawn closer to her allure despite the fact that her resume has some seemingly glaring holes -- people she's been associated with have gone missing.
When Aoyama decides to call Asami, we're introduced to the most disturbing scene in the movie: her empty apartment, her figure seen sitting by the phone and a large canvas bag (seen near the background). Once the phone rings, the canvas bag suddenly jerks, Asami coldly smiles, a scene that totally switches the romantic tone of the film and makes a screaming left turn into what can only be considered a surrealistic nightmare or a bad acid trip that is devoid of "true resolution" -- by Miike's own words. And by doing so, ODISHON becomes Asami's story, her reenaction of a trauma inflicted on her by a sick older man, with Aoyama as her newest victim.
This is definitely a powerful film with layers of subtext and a study on how to create a convincing horror story in which we are the monsters and agents of our own entrapments, and that even monsters who re-enact their crucial split with reality were themselves once battered children. Of course, I would not recommend this as a movie to watch if one is "getting to know" their date. There is something revolting of not knowing the reason that a flapping, disembodied tongue just happens to be in front of the front door of your date's apartment.
Real horror is not about the actual confrontation between the hero/heroine and the monster in the attic, but about the anticipation leading to that encounter where we see an impending sense of wrongness, of something terrible lurking just around the corner that may have an equally horrible gift in tow.
Takashi Miike, the true star and ringleader of this disturbing foray into terror, brings us a (deceptively simple) set-up about a TV producer, Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), who is looking for a bride by the use of an ruse: an "audition" for a "film." (It all has the lighthearted tone of a romantic comedy of manners, depicting sexual attitudes in a totally different culture.) Once he settles for a shy girl dressed in complete, virginal white, Asami, (Eihi Shiina), the stage is set for their subsequent meetings as he is drawn closer to her allure despite the fact that her resume has some seemingly glaring holes -- people she's been associated with have gone missing.
When Aoyama decides to call Asami, we're introduced to the most disturbing scene in the movie: her empty apartment, her figure seen sitting by the phone and a large canvas bag (seen near the background). Once the phone rings, the canvas bag suddenly jerks, Asami coldly smiles, a scene that totally switches the romantic tone of the film and makes a screaming left turn into what can only be considered a surrealistic nightmare or a bad acid trip that is devoid of "true resolution" -- by Miike's own words. And by doing so, ODISHON becomes Asami's story, her reenaction of a trauma inflicted on her by a sick older man, with Aoyama as her newest victim.
This is definitely a powerful film with layers of subtext and a study on how to create a convincing horror story in which we are the monsters and agents of our own entrapments, and that even monsters who re-enact their crucial split with reality were themselves once battered children. Of course, I would not recommend this as a movie to watch if one is "getting to know" their date. There is something revolting of not knowing the reason that a flapping, disembodied tongue just happens to be in front of the front door of your date's apartment.