Takashi Miike: The Shape-Shifter

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Trying to summarise Takashi Miike’s career is like trying to describe the weather for an entire year. He has directed something north of a hundred films since the early 1990s, sometimes half a dozen in a single twelve-month stretch, and they refuse to belong to one genre or even one register. There are extreme-horror shockers and gentle children’s fantasies. There are yakuza epics and musicals, samurai remakes and superhero comedies, straight-to-video crime pictures and prestige period dramas that premiered at Cannes. The through-line is not a subject or a style. It is a temperament: a refusal to hold still, and a sabotage instinct that goes off exactly when you think you know what film you are watching.

Visitor Q: The Most Transgressive Family Comedy Ever Made

Sat, 04 May 2024 11:00:00 +0000

There is a category of film that exists mainly to be dared. You hear the list of taboos it breaks before you ever see a frame, and the reputation does the film’s work for it — a checklist of atrocity passed hand to hand among the curious and the strong-stomached. Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q (2001) is the reigning champion of that category, and it has spent two decades being recommended in exactly the wrong spirit: as an endurance test, a gauntlet, a thing you survive rather than watch.

Transgressive - vo.rs

Takashi Miike: The Shape-Shifter

Visitor Q: The Most Transgressive Family Comedy Ever Made