For those who can’t wait to have their brains scrambled by a transgressive, fucked-up new film, if you have Netflix you’re in luck. There’s a new feature, and a mini-series, by a true cult legend- Sion Sono, who has directed many perverse, wild movies in the past but outdoes himself here to create a sprawling epic based on a real Japanese serial killer- Futoshi Matsunaga, a con man and psycho who tortured and murdered (along with female accomplice Junko Ogata), and whose crimes were so hideous the newspapers wouldn’t print them. Sono’s film The Forest of Love is really a loose retelling of Matsunaga’s crimes using his own punk sensibility and throwing in familiar tropes from his earlier films- girls in Japanese schoolgirl outfits, teen suicide, etc. Typically, it’s overlong (2 ½ hours) but as it picks up steam towards the end it’s so insane, twisted and sick you think you’ve lost your mind. Also on Netflix is Sion Sono’s 7-part mini-series of the same story The Forest of Love: Deep Cut, which is the same cast and sequences from the film, but even more fleshed-out. I find the feature more enigmatic and disturbing, though.
Japanese director Sion Sono’s career is filled with some unforgettable shockers.
Suicide Club (2001). begins with 54 Japanese schoolgirls holding hands and merrily jumping to their death in front of a subway. The rash of suicides are all linked to a weird website and an all-girl bubblegum pop band.
Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005) was the “prequel” to Suicide Club, about an unhappy 17-year-old girl who runs away from home and hooks up in Tokyo with a girl she meets on a subversive website. The girl lives with people that are hired out to be a “family” for lonely grandmothers and fathers. Typically (for Sono) there’s a bizarre fake “happy family dinner” staged in a room littered with bloody corpses.
In Strange Circus (2005), a young girl is stuffed into a cello case (with a peephole) by her pervert father and forced to watch her mother have sex in this harrowing tale of family sexual abuse. But is this twisted tale just from the feverish imagination of a transgressive wheelchair-bound female author?
Exte: Hair Extensions (2207) is about a morgue attendant who steals a corpse because it keeps growing hair- out of the mouth, the eye, etc., selling pieces off to beauty parlors. Unfortunately, it’s “grudge” hair, filled with the rage of the victim who was kidnapped and had her organs harvested by shadowy villains. Filled with creepy, disturbing, scenes- tresses growing out of eyeballs, fingernails, cuts on skin, make for hair-raising horror.
Love Exposure (2008) has everything- child abuse; cults; castration; perverts; priests and panties photos, all part of a cracked saga But at its heart it is really a love story, albeit a demented one. It’s not every day that you see a four-hour movie about a guy who springs a boner at the sight of a woman’s panties. Blasphemously entertaining, don’t be daunted by the length- it feels shorter than most movies and it’s staggeringly great. Think- Titanic for perverts.
Why Don’t You Play in Hell? (2013) An exhaustingly insane, splattery ode to moviemaking. It’s about an aspiring young filmmaker who gets hired by a Yakuza gangster to promote his former-child-star daughter, only to end up slipping and sliding in blood and gore while filming during a massive, gruesome, shoot-out/sword-fight with a rival gang.
Sono suffered a heart attack in 2019 which slightly postponed his first English-language film starring Nicolas Cage called Prisoners of the Ghostland. From what I’ve read it’s about a criminal; a curse; and an abducted girl. Cage admitted to the press it was “the wildest movie I’ve ever made,” which is saying a lot.
Now back to The Forest of Love, the movie. Flashing back and forth in time there are three storylines at work that calamitously collide. Meanwhile we see on the local TV news they keep reporting on an elusive serial killer at large. There are two young women who have been traumatized by an event when they attended an all girl’s school. In flashbacks from happier times they remember rehearsing a play- an all-girl, lesbian version of Romeo & Juliet. Taeko (Kyoko Hinami), who directed the play, is now a punked-out self-proclaimed slut with a limp caused by (well you just have to watch to find out). Mitsuko (Eri Kamataki), who played Juliet in the play, is now a lonely agoraphobic living with her parents, locked up in a room full of dolls, masturbating to her ghostly memory of the girl who played Romeo.
Into Mitsuko’s life comes con man Joe Murata (wonderful Kippei Shina), driving a flashy car, wearing a white suit, claiming that he graduated from Harvard; works for the CIA; and is a singer/songwriter. When Taeko hears about this she freaks out, knowing what a creep Joe is after he swindled her own sister and mother in the past.
Then there’s the trio of young, male, would-be filmmakers squatting in a building that was once a film studio. They decide to focus their movie on Joe Murato, convinced this con man is actually the serial killer. Unfortunately, Joe soon hijacks the film, dragging Taeko and Mitsuko into the project, subjecting them to electrical shocks to keep them in line and ecstatically proclaiming, “movies are about emotion!”
Everything eventually spirals out-of-control into murder, dismemberment and madness in ways you won’t see coming. It really made me laugh thinking of people stumbling on this one night on Netflix and losing their minds. If Netflix can support directors as wonderfully subversive as Sion Sono, maybe there is hope for the universe.