Shinya Tsukamoto
Nightmare Detective

Sbaaaaaaaaaaaddaaaaaaabaaaaaaaaaaaam! Here we are.

We all need to sleep. And we don't even know why. Sleep is one of the great mysteries of biology. And even more, dreams are. Seriously: where do dreams come from, why are they there? I mean, images that form in our heads while we're asleep, and of which we sometimes retain a more or less pale memory; whether or not we have this memory, we dream every time we sleep. Why? I mean, between unconscious desire fulfillment, the evolutionary purpose theory of dreams, synthesis-activation, Big Dreams, nightmares, night terrors, lucid dreams, and OBEs, nothing makes sense, it's never been understood. Yet, it's a certainty: we all need to sleep.

We all have to die.

Existentialism, inventiveness, schizophrenia. Maybe you can associate these terms with different directors, like someone who defined their cinema as existentialist, Cronenberg, or someone who overlaps parallel realities, confuses them and makes a chimera from them, Lynch? Then you think of Craven because if dreams are involved, well, A Nightmare On Elm Street is there, but only briefly, because then when the nightmare-death-blood sequence returns, it does so in a distressing and hallucinatory way. It messes up everything. Not entertaining. Disturbing. Because there is reality in what happens.

You eat everything up, references, influences, things, themes borrowed, other directors, no, what an idiot you are. Tsukamoto is Tsukamoto. Tsukamoto's films don't delve into the unconscious; they pave the way by leaving a crater and pull it out, show it to you, and smack you with it. No, damn. It's not true. But seriously, is it me? A part of you you didn't know you had. Thoughts you wouldn't want to be alone with during a sleepless night. The fear of emptiness. The joy of eternity. The darkness. The meaninglessness of existence. But also of non-existence. Will, death instinct. Disappearance from the world. Suicidal thoughts. Blood. Hatred. Boredom. Before coming into the world, would you ever have said that the world was such a boring place? Maybe it's luck, maybe the alternative to boredom is the desire to disappear. You didn't even know it would end like this, you couldn't imagine being the cause of everything... absurd.

"0", perhaps, could be death itself, but also life and everything in between. An entity that breaks into the game played with only one possible outcome. We constantly face death and don't realize it, because on the other side of the playing field, it's always us. "0" has declared war on existence.

Needless to say, we're in a Tsukamoto film, the editing is hectic, frenetic, every shot, every cut must be studied to embody the lucid delirium of the induced thoughts destined to overwhelm the viewer. Frenzied direction but far too grounded, never losing touch with reality despite being in a timeless limbo pervaded by a suffocating shroud. It takes great skill to create tension; otherwise, there's no respectable tension, or at least it becomes elusive, intangible. But we want it to be concrete. The weight of the thoughts must bend you. We want the flow to remain, for the void to invade you.