Koroshiya 1 [Ichi the Killer] (2001)

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) Even nearly twenty years later, Ichi the Killer remains infamous as a film that goes well beyond whatever boundaries we expect even from hard-core horror cinema. Renowned for its excessively gory violence, twisted psychosexual themes and utterly amoral compass, it remains banned in at least three countries (including the normally permissive Norway), often pops up in lists of extreme movies and is often mentioned as a landmark to see how strong a moviegoer’s stomach is. And yet, while watching it, I found it curiously easy to remain uninvolved and unimpressed at the amount of gratuitous violence shown on screen. Gratuitous actually doesn’t become the right word—a better one would be grandguignolesque. Writer-director Takashi Miike has made a film to shock the rubes, and will stop at nothing to gross out the audience. Once you catch on to the trick, though… it’s not as if the film has anything like a conscience—seeing bad people do bad things to each other isn’t a path to the kind of empathy we’d need to be revolted at what’s on-screen. I could give you a long list of the terrible and unbearable sights in the film, but I fear that it would make it seem far more interesting than it is to watch. In reality, Ichi the Killer showcases such a relentless succession of atrocities that they become numbing—as if the brain throws up a circuit breaker in defence. As a result (and not helped along by a direction that cares far more about gory set-pieces than coherent plotting) the film does feel interminable, and increasingly obnoxious as it goes on. By the end, we’re so fed up with the whole thing that it doesn’t matter who kills who in whatever way—the film is over and that’s quite enough of a reward.