Strange Circus

A Japanese horror film. A woman is writing a novel. She uses a wheelchair, does not leave the house and has an assistant; the text she writes comes alive inside the film. The novel is about a girl. Mitsuko grows up in the house of her mother and her father, who is a school principal; what happens in that house is systematic abuse, and the child is forced to watch it from inside a cupboard. An idea of exchange between mother and daughter enters, and from there the narrative blurs who is who. From there the film moves between two layers: the novel being written and the life of the woman writing it. Which is real keeps changing. The assistant becomes curious. He starts looking into her past, and what he finds sets up the last turn. What the narrative is interested in is not the scare but memory: the film is about the way trauma rewrites its own story, and builds that as a puzzle. The visual language is extreme: red curtains, circus music, the image of a guillotine and rooms arranged like a stage. Sion Sono wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone curious about extreme Japanese cinema and formal experiments in horror. Who it is not for: almost everyone; the film takes child abuse as its direct subject and some scenes are very hard to sit through.