Takashi Miike spins this black comedy about the most dysfunctional family on the planet. The film opens with a father (Kenichi Endo) – a gung-ho TV reporter – not only paying to have sex with his estranged prostitute daughter in an anonymous hotel room but also videotaping the act as part of a documentary about young people today. His son, who is brutalized on a daily basis by schoolyard bullies, beats, whips, and terrorizes his mother (Shungiku Uchida), who is covered with welts and bruises. Mom in turn finds solace in heroin and is not above hooking to pay for the habit. Their lives change for the better when a mysterious stranger (Kazushi Watanabe) cracks the father over the head with a rock and eventually shows them the way to familial happiness. Of course, this way includes multiple murders, necrophilia, and a kitchen full of breast milk. –Rotten Tomatoes
A highly prolific and controversial Japanese filmmaker, Takashi MIIKE was born on August 24, 1960 in Yao, Osaka, Japan. Under the guidance of renowned filmmaker Shohei IMAMURA (a two-time Palme d’Or winner at Cannes), Miike graduated from the Yokohama Vocational School of Broadcast and Film.
Miike’s first films were television productions, but he also began directing several high-quality direct-to-video releases. His theatrical debut came in 1995 with Shinjuku Triad Society, and its success gave him the freedom to work on more ambitious projects. One of the most successful Japanese directors currently working, he has also garnered a strong cult following in the West that is growing rapidly as more of his films become available in translated form on DVD.
Some of Miike’s most popular films include Audition, the Dead or Alive trilogy, Ichi the Killer, Gozu, Izo, and Big Bang Love, Juvenile A.
Miike has achieved international notoriety for depicting shocking scenes… read more
I wonder if Miike was aware of the Freudian metaphors on family and the idea of domestic functionality?
A (sur)realistic puzzle about the modern family: even with no missing piece, one additional will make alll other fit perfectly. Add destruction on destruction and the opposite occurs.
The family that fornicates, rapes, and murders together...stays together?! Takashi Miike's "Visitor Q" is perhaps the apex of pitch-black comedy and the 'Tokyo Shock'-style of filmmaking. This kind of 'extreme Asian cinema' has exploded in popularity in the intervening years, and there have certainly been films in the genre more polished and well-made than "Visitor Q," but Miike's 2001 effort still deserves the credit for dropping jaws worldwide and helping to generate interest in Asian cinema. The last 20 minutes of this film are deliriously fun in all the wrong ways. You've got to hand it to a movie that makes you feel like you're doing something illegal just by watching it.
Have you seen Pier Paolo Passolini's Teorema (1968) with Terence Stamp? The influence on Visitor Q is clear, even though Miike's film takes a very different direction in terms of the ideas he and the scriptwriter had in mind.
