Izo Review

Be warned. Takashi Miike's is a difficult, troubling and just plain weird film. That seems like a strange warning to put on a Miike film – after all, has he not built his reputation on being precisely those things? – but it's a warning aimed particularly at Miike fans. Izo is the most artistically ambitious of Miike's films, an intentional 'big issue' film that may have some recognizably Miike shots but is so different in tone and content that it will be hard viewing for most, particularly here in the west, and a familiarity with Miike's early work may actually be more hindrance than help. The gleeful madman is gone entirely, replaced by … well, it's hard to say exactly.

The story of a vengeful spirit back from the dead to wreak bloody vengeance on the world that spawned him the film is difficult to approach on two counts. First, it assumes a very strong knowledge of Japanese culture that most here simply will not have. Many figures that would be instantly recognizable within Japan – the title character himself is borrowed from earlier films and was once played by Shintaro Katsu – crop up throughout without any explanation and you may, like me, frequently hear the whizz of references zinging past overhead. And it's not just characters, it's entire time periods … Izo has come unstuck in time and flits about from period to period, region to region, seeking out the powers that be without any warning or explanation, the only clues as to where and when he is being the modes of dress: again, things recognizable to a native Japanese but not so much outside of Japan.

The second difficulty lies in the structure of the film. I will confess to giving up after forty five minutes the first time I watched the film, returning only after watching the lengthy Secrets of Izo special feature – which goes a long way to helping contextualize the film while also giving a good behind the scenes look at its making – and hearing Miike describe the film as a sutra. This is a film that completely abandons conventional narrative and story in favor of symbols and concepts. The world is overseen by some mystical panel of experts – Beat Takeshi and Ryuhei Matsuda among them – that immediately brought to mind the Illuminati, though these seem purely conceptual and have a reach across time. The film loops and curls back upon itself, constantly repeating scenarios in different time frames as Miike strives to demonstrate that nothing ever truly changes. The film follows its own rules entirely and you must be prepared to leave your preconceptions at the door and let it take you where it may.

With its intense anti-violence message – the film has been described as the most violent anti-violence film ever – and its hero bouncing through time the only obvious point of comparison for this is Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, but this is far more abstract. Izo exists as a primal urge, simply lashing out at whatever is around him, and Miike uses the repetition and brutishness of the violence, which he seldom glams up, to argue that violence is senseless and accomplishes nothing other than breeding more violence. It seems an odd position for a director like Miike, whose international reputation is based entirely on his flair for on screen violence, to be taking, but there it is and you have to wonder if his current move into family film (The Great Yokai War, the upcoming Ultraman) and more serious drama (the upcoming Shark Fin Soup) since the making of Izo represents some sort of philosophical change in the man himself. Could Izo be Miike breaking from his past?

So, it's a difficult film, one that you watch more for interest than entertainment, but it seems far from the failure that early buzz labeled it as when approached on its own terms. And with their coming DVD release Media Blasters has done a solid job of giving the film some context in which to succeed on these shores.

The first disc contains the film itself in an anamorphic transfer with an English dub as well as the original Japanese audio and English subtitles. The transfer itself is solid but it shows the limitations of the source as the film was shot digitally and originally intended for a direct to video release, so the budget and effects are not what they would have been for a film targeted to theaters from the beginning. The interesting materials fall on the second disc in the form of a Making Of doc and the aforementioned, and very lengthy, Secrets of Izo doc. The Secrets segment is made up of behind the scenes footage, some production diary styled footage, and interview footage with the director and cast talking about both the making of the film and the intended meaning. Given that the film is idea driven rather than plot driven and thus nearly impossible to 'spoil' per se, I would actually recommend watching this doc before watching the film itself to get yourself up to speed with the basic intentions and concepts of the film.

There has never truly been a Miike film for the masses and Izo is not about to break that string. High on concept and rather heavy handed in execution it likely does not stand a chance of making any new Miike fans while also polarizing the current batch. This is not the crowd pleasing Miike of Zebraman or The Great Yokai War, nor the gleeful trangessor of Ichi the Killer, but something else entirely. This is Miike experimenting as an artist rather than a craftsman and while it is not entirely successful it is an interesting attempt.