Visitor Q

A film set inside a Japanese family's house. The father works in television. He is about to lose his job and has a camera; he is trying to make a report about young people. The film opens with a question. A line of text appears on screen and the man is with his own daughter, for money. The house is a wreck. The son is beaten at school and beats his mother when he gets home; the mother uses drugs and works outside for money; the daughter has left. One day a stranger comes to the house. He hits the father on the head with a stone and then settles in; nobody objects. From there the film watches the family come apart. The visitor does nothing, he simply stands there, and what was happening accelerates. What the narrative is interested in is not violence but the camera: the father films everything and the film folds his footage into its own; the real subject is the person watching. The tone is deliberately unbearable. A killing, a corpse, milk and a scene of sexual violence are shown directly, and none of it is for suspense. At the end the family comes together, and that is the most disturbing part; the narrative gives the recovery as a nightmare too. It was made on a very small budget on digital video. The film was part of a series of six in which directors were given a free hand; the running time was short and the technical means were limited. Takashi Miike was making more than one film a year in that period, and this is counted among the most extreme works of his career. Kenichi Endo, Shungicu Uchida and Kazushi Watanabe are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone curious about Japanese independent cinema with no limits. Who it is not for: almost everyone; the film shows sexual violence, incest and corpses openly and protects the viewer nowhere.