Shinya Tsukamoto
Tetsuo - The Iron Man

Tetsuo - The Iron Man

It is practically impossible to remain indifferent when watching this film from 1989, the debut work of Shinya Tsukamoto which won the FantaFestival in Rome that very year.

This film, “Tetsuo, the Iron Man”, automatically associates with adjectives such as shocking, anxious, terrifying, hallucinatory, and so on. It might even seem “disturbing” to a fan of genres like horror or splatter-movies, due to its narrative “rawness” outside the western storytelling conventions and the visionary power of certain images that include truly disconcerting sequences. The plot, once again, is minimal and serves as a support base for the incredible infernal escalation that the protagonist will undergo over the course of the film's abundant hour.

Indeed, it tells the story of an ordinary man who, while shaving one morning, accidentally discovers a strange wire coming out of his face (a moment reminiscent of Pirandello). In attempting to remove it, he injures himself and discovers that the wire itself was metal. From that moment, a slow and inexorable transformation into a kind of cyborg covered inside and out with metal begins. A metal-cancer that expands everywhere at increasingly fast rates and causes the camera to adopt the same pace and schizophrenia as the protagonist. A kind of symbolic virus that, from the man, covers and infects the entire world.
But the film is also an original use of animated sequences frame-by-frame, with parts shot in spectacular black and white in 16 mm and moments that are truly psychedelic and mind-blowing, edited in progression and in total harmony with the protagonist's “dehumanization”.
A frenetic editing that owes much to extreme video art installations with an obsessive, morbid, and “truly sick” attention in showing the details of the metallic contamination the protagonist (and we with him) will undergo.

Even the few existing sex scenes (how could one not mention the drill-penis, with which the protagonist kills his own girlfriend?) play on themes that will always be dear to the director: body transformation and sex seen as deviation (not far from Cronenberg).

From a purely cinematic standpoint, the film perhaps suffers from a “predictability” schematic, and, once the protagonist's transformation plot is established, the film, narratively speaking, becomes little more than a pretext for frenetic shots, battles, wars, subliminal flashes as if we were inside a sort of mad video game with no possibility of control, between a very tight music video style editing, a sparse presence of dialogues, the screeching of techno and noise music, a grating black and white like few others, and the random intrusion of sequences that are almost impossible to decipher, so much so that even today it is difficult to find a unified interpretation of the ultimate meaning of this film, which has meanwhile become a true Cult-Movie of the genre and paved the way for hundreds of imitators who rarely reached the visionary nature of the original.

One of the most distressing films I have ever seen, whose viewing created in me (at the then venerable age of 32!) a true and tangible disturbance that kept me awake for two consecutive nights, nor my poor wife who was just pregnant.

Film to handle with care and not suitable for the easily impressionable.