he vintage year of 1999 has been back in the critical conversation recently for its quarter-centenary; it was the year of The Sixth Sense, The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty – and there can hardly have been more brilliant and more disturbing film of that time than Takashi Miike’s demonically inspired, a nightmarishly violent parable of sexual politics and national malaise which launched his reputation in the west as a master of the macabre and the extreme.
Perhaps Miike has never quite equalled that hideous display of cruelty and fear, or perhaps it is truer to say he never again brought these things into such a sharp dramatic focus. But he certainly has kept up an extraordinary productivity and his latest movie – unveiled at last year’s Tokyo film festival and– has a typically gonzo freakiness, in that characteristically Miike style of throwing everything into the mix.
Lumberjack the Monster is a case of monster v monster. There’s a serial killer going around attacking people with an axe and removing their brains. In a Miike film, we would expect no less. A brilliant forensic profiler called Toshiro is on the Lumberjack’s trail. But this killer finds that one of the people he attacks is quite as inhuman and monstrous as he is.
The movie as a whole is entirely crazy and operatically over-the-top. Despite the “whodunnit” aspect of the Lumberjack’s eventual unmasking, there is not much here of the kind of narrative plausibility that another type of drama might feel constrained to include so that audiences can invest emotionally, and therefore feel more intimately disturbed. Like so many Miike films, this is a firework display of strangeness, alienation and nihilism. It’s quite a spectacle.