Rating: B+
Dir: Sion Sono
Star: Chiaki Kuriyama, Ren Ôsugi, Miku Satô, Tsugumi
It feels like Sono is coming up fast on Takashi Miike as my favourite Japanese director. I can’t think of one of Sono’s movies which has failed to exceed expectations, and the more I see, the higher those expectations are becoming. This has such a mad premise, it needs a special talent to pull it off, and Sono knocks it out of the park. I mean, hair possessed by the angry spirit of a dead organ trafficking victim? Whose body and its ever-growing tresses get stolen by a morgue attendant Yamazaki (Ôsugi) with a hair fetish? He has a sideline in top of the line extensions, but his latest batch come with a side-effect: death. Typically caused by hair sprouting from your nails, eyes, tongue and any other orifices not normally requiring a shave. In extreme cases, these will act like the chains in Hellraiser (below). “Jesus wept” was one of my milder pithy exclamations during this.
Meanwhile, wannabe stylist Yûko Mizushima (Kuriyama, recognizable as Gogo Yubari from Kill Bill) has come into Yamazaki’s crosshairs, due to her luscious locks, along with her fellow trainees. Oh, and in addition to all this, you also get a harrowing slice of kitchen-sink social drama and child abuse. Because Yûko’s sister, Kiyomi (Tsugumi), a worthless mother and – let’s be honest – all-round cunt, dumps her little daughter Mami (Satô), literally on her sibling’s doorstep. The poor kid has been mentally and physically beaten down, but shows signs of life when introduced to the world of hairdressing.
Know what would probably cheer her up? How about some nice hair extensions! All together, now: “Nooooooooo…” Before we get there, however, it’s a gleeful stream of what-the-fuckery, right from the opening scene where dockyard security guards discover a shipping container filled to the gunnels with human hair and a corpse, missing some organs and other bits ‘n’ pieces. That sets the tone, and things only get weirder from there. In a number of scenes, you will probably find yourself spending half the time wondering how they got hair to do that, and the other half wondering who came up with this insanity – as well as fervently hoping they are receiving the appropriate therapy for it.
Somehow, Sono manages to take the disparate elements here and combine them into something which doesn’t just work, it works very well. It could be viewed, in a certain light and with some squinting, as a parody of perhaps the most-popular of J-horror tropes, the long-haired ghost girl. Here, it’s the hair which is the threat, rather than the girl. However, it’s all done utterly straight, though there will likely be plenty of “I don’t believe what I’m seeing”-induced laughter. If it’s the purpose of horror to open dark doors and see what’s behind them, this is a resounding success. I’d rarely thought of hair much before, and certainly never as creepy or threatening. Suffice to say, that apathy has certainly changed.