Whether it’s the casual, interspersed slaughter of Dead or Alive and Ichi the Killer or the unsettling buildup to the painful climax of Audition, Takashi Miike’s most seminal films can be broken down into bizarre cycles of exposition and violence. In the aforementioned movies, he cultivates tension and unnerves the viewer for just long enough that when the killing does begin, it’s almost cathartic in its brutality — after all, violence is one of the easiest things to understand.
Miike’s Izo, released in 2004, is this cycle both turned on its head and taken to its extreme conclusion, and as a result, the symbolism is heavyhanded, the exposition is lengthy, the killing is numbingly frequent, and there’s about thirty minutes in total of a guy screaming and playing acoustic guitar.
