Rating: 4/5
Hooptober 8.0 | 30/34 | Asian horror 3/3 | Decades 8/8 | 60s
A pool full of human parts — replicas. A psychiatrist can create fingers, faces, or anything requested.
Inferiority complexes dig holes in the psyche, and I fill them in.
Okuyama experiences an explosion during an industrial accident at work. The explosion covers his face with burns. He wears bandages to hide them despite his wife suggesting otherwise. He becomes hostile and obsessed with faces and attraction.
— I feel as if I've been buried alive. — You closed the door yourself. No one's stopping you from getting out.
As he looks out the window, the exterior resembles an eyeball, with vascular trees reaching from the corners into a bloodshot sky. The light from the fireplace flickers like TV static against his bandaged face.
Okuyama visits his boss and requests time off. His boss reminds Okuyama that he offered it before, and Okuyama refused it, so of course, it’s okay.
— I want time to figure out for myself whether I'm really qualified to stay on here. — You're the same person. What's there to figure out?
Okuyama goes to see the psychiatrist, who proposes an experimental mask. The problem is — the mask may change Okuyama’s personality and mannerisms. Okuyama agrees, turning his life into an experiment wherein he lives life as both himself and as a different person.
Alongside Okuyama’s story, we follow a Hibakusha woman with scars on her neck and cheek. She works in a psychiatric ward with WWII veterans. She wears her hair in a way that obscures her scars, feeling like they isolate her. Her story is smaller, and her arc is more familiar.
The woman is Okuyama’s opposite, the Jekyll to his Hyde. Okuyama is self-centered, manipulative, and childish, whereas she is giving, caring, and forthright. It is so stark that it clarifies what the movie thinks of Okuyama — there is no pity or understanding. Everyone close to him allowed him to carry on living. It was he who claimed to be a monster, and he who became one.
Another way the movie reflects his selfishness is how none of the characters have names except for him. Their names aren’t meaningful to him — only their function in relationship to him.
The predominant theme of the movie is that everything is a masquerade. Everyone pretends, and everyone has multiple selves that appear for their audiences. His wife talks about makeup and how women feel as though they are unpresentable without makeup.
I have so many selves, I can't even contain them all.
The film itself is aware of the superficial nature of its story. There are moments when the movie becomes more artificial. At times, the background noise fades, and the lights dim, focusing solely on the psychiatrist and Okuyama. When he worries the super’s daughter will blow his cover, he gives a “yikes” face to the camera.
The psychiatrist is the unnecessary monologue, making subtext text. He wants Okuyama to be open and share everything so his contribution is meaningful. His office is a strange void, an in-between state. The world around it is surreal. At one point, a door opens, and it looks like hair underwater is overtaking it. At another, we can see a soundtrack musician in the background, playing the non-diegetic music.
We only see Okuyama’s true face at oblong angles or through distorted glass, rendering him unknowable to the audience.
Scenes repeat in blocking and framing that Okuyama experienced as himself in bandages and as his new persona. Others repeat as inversions, as though looking inside the mask. Scenes tear at the edges, and light from nowhere leaks in — the audio clips and distorts as though consuming itself.
The soundtrack is discordant, distant, alienating. It soaks in darkness, tingeing every moment.
This film is one of the few experimental films I’ve seen that maintains a coherent narrative structure. Anyone who watches this could tell you what happened. Yet, many images and moments enhance the strangeness and pull at the seams.
** Stray Thoughts / Spoilers **
- I don’t understand what upset everyone about the girl’s yo-yo.
- The makeup is effective at making his face look unreal.
- He has sex with his wife as someone else. Does he not think she knows his smell, knows his body? She wants to be near him, and if the only way he’ll allow it is through this fantasy, she plays along.
- The strange image of the brother crying at the window, the voice clipping and distorting, the image inverting and unveiling him as a slab of meat. The bright flash of another bomb, another war.
- Crowd without faces — what a striking image