Rating: 3/5
Hooptober 2.0 | 11/31 | Takashi Miike 1/5
Why do you all come out here to die? What is wrong with you?
A woman in a fine dining restaurant eats soup. Her spoon draws out what looks like a head. She pulls out the rest of the creature. The movie converts to claymation as she screams. When the monster with angel wings comes to life, it falls in love with her convulsing uvula and rips it out of her throat.
We watch a lengthy cycle of “thing kills thing” until a crow flies over Jinpei Katakuri and shits on his head, turning the film back into live-action. Masao kills the bird and sics Pochi, their dog, to fetch it. Yurie, his great-granddaughter, watches while burying a dead goldfish and wonders, “What makes a happy family?”
Yurie explains how Masao, her grandfather, was a shoe salesperson. The company laid him off, so he used his redundancy pay to purchase an old house. He intends to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast in anticipation of the highway expanding to the house. She then goes over each family member’s failure that led to them working at the bed-and-breakfast.
They haven’t expanded the highway, so the house has no guests. The film details that summer at the bed-and-breakfast as the family looks for happiness and all the guests die mysterious deaths.
The film is a genre-bending collection of ideas — a surrealist farce, a musical comedy, a family melodrama, and so on. It’s also a loose remake of The Quiet Family, a movie I haven’t seen.
Because the movie is so scattershot, some moments had me dying laughing and other parts had me impatiently tapping my fingers. I wish this were, like, 30 minutes shorter.
Still, this film never takes itself seriously and always commits to the bit, so I’m on board.