Visitor Q (2001)

Takashi Miike's Visitor Q arrived in 2001 as the sixth and final entry in the Love Cinema series, a set of low-budget digital video experiments screened at a single small Tokyo cinema. It concerns the Yamazaki household: a father who films his own son being beaten in the street, a mother who injects heroin between acts of prostitution, a daughter who charges her father for sex, and a son who strikes his mother with a rug beater. Into this arrangement walks a stranger in a red shirt who hits the father with a rock, teaches the mother to lactate, and leaves the family, somehow, happier. The film mimics home video and documentary footage, a formal choice that lends its grotesqueries a flat, unblinking realism.

We might expect such material to arrive wrapped in commentary. It does not. Nothing here argues a position, proposes a remedy, or invites the audience toward any improved understanding of the world. The cruelty is the point and also the entire text. Domestic violence, incest, necrophilia, and assault are staged for discomfort and laughter in equal measure, with no framework offered to interpret them. A viewer searching for a thesis will find only a rock to the skull.

This is not a failure of nerve. Miike has made pointed films elsewhere. Visitor Q simply has no interest in instruction. Its bodies are props for shock, its economics incidental, its history invented, its sympathies nowhere in evidence. What remains is a nasty, disciplined, frequently funny exercise in provocation, made by people who understood exactly what they were doing and declined to explain it. On the scale of social instruction, the film registers nothing at all, and it commits to that nothing with real conviction.