fter a yakuza boss' (Ishibashi) right-hand man, Aniki (Aikawa), apparently goes insane, he is sent off to be murdered by his own protege, Minami (Sone). While en route to the execution, Minami rescues a potential victim of Aniki's senseless wrath, and inadvertently kills his mentor before a proper death can be inflicted.
As he wrestles with what to do next with Aniki, Minami finds that his body has mysteriously disappeared, and the young man is without appropriate resources to recover it.
Enlisting the help of a coterie of oddball colleagues, including Nose (Hino), a bag man whose face is half obscured by diseased white skin, Minami struggles to find Aniki before he too faces his boss' wrath, and to escape the world of madness that seems to close in on him from every side.
Weird—but to what end?
Takashi Miike is one of the many "prodigious talents" proliferating in the Japanese horror scene of late, bouncing along with the likes of Hideo Nakata (Ringu) and Takashi Shimizu (Ju-On and its forthcoming American remake, The Grudge) on a cultural aesthetic defined by eccentricity and unexplained phenomena, much of which is mistaken for brilliance.
2000's Audition was Miike's international breakthrough, a mishmash of gruesome viscera and sexual hijinks, and a sort of Last Tango in Paris for the S&M set. Though the 20 or so productions he's helmed in between then and now have not all made it stateside (save for bootleg and region-free DVDs that abound online), what direction Gozu marks for the filmmaker has yet to be determined.
For one, criticisms that this movie is just plain "weird for the sake of being weird" cannot be disproven, except by the shrewedest or at the least the most familiar viewers of Miike's work; watching a man attack a Pomeranian on the street and swing it a like a tetherball is an auspicious opening that recalls vintage David Lynch, complete with an eccentric melding of genres (gangsters with horror, etc.) that inspires curiosity, but the best of those films finds time enough to define those weird worlds, and this film certainly does not. Rather, the story becomes a free-floating narrative loosely assembled in a series of vignettes, each tangentially connected by characters and an approximation of plot, but which signify nothing to the casual viewer. Ultimately, whether it's due to language, aesthetic or cultural barriers, Gozu simply doesn't add up to any more than a string of weird events that feel like they were expressly designed to antagonize and provoke the audience.
