Takashi Miike
Imprint

'Imprint' is the latest great film in chronological order from the hyperproductive Japanese master Takashi Miike, one of the best filmmakers of the "macabre" genre that we have at the moment on planet Earth. The notion that he might be the greatest stems from his vast array of masterpieces over a few years and from the Masters of Horror series from which this one-hour film is taken. For example, the film by Argento in the anthology pales in comparison to the brilliance of 'Imprint', a symptom of the decline of a way of making horror films that has become tiresome and repetitive without offering new ideas. Miike doesn't care about the past and opens up new expressive possibilities, continuing on his path.

"Imprint" is a step even further beyond "Audition"; the tortures depicted in this film are almost certainly the most heinous and traumatic tortures I've witnessed in cinema, even more brutal than those in the last insane 20 minutes of 'Audition' which disturbed everyone with its sadistic violence and disorienting atmospheres at the limits of endurance. With 'Imprint', he goes even further, and as in "Ichi the Killer", Miike surpasses himself with sequences that ooze the black blood of death, complementing something shown to us in an irreplicable and damned state of grace. It's even more extreme than his other works due to a symbolism used to render the insaneness that infiltrates human relationships so effectively: the abortion depicted by the sequence of the fetus forcefully pulled by hands from the womb, the interrogation of the prostitute, or the image of the fetus flowing down the river.

The torture scene is, of course, also Miike's self-celebration as a master in maximizing visual suggestion with this display of atrocities. Consider abortion and incest, two topics that to call taboo in Western countries would be an understatement, and the foreigner in a foreign land, an American, who roams astonished and incredulous among these phantasmagoric tents and soon gains direct knowledge of the horrific secrets of the local inhabitants. The American in this case is the one who sees what is on the tip of every pin, sees before his eyes what his culture has kept hidden from his compatriots but which exists, perhaps in the prisons of Guantanamo, far from the cameras, but exists, just as the dark side exists within each of us that makes us greedy and deceitful, represented in this case by the figure of the disfigured whore who hides within her head the twin sister, the demonic side of the prostitute that wants to take over, represented by a hand, a symbol of grabbing more than shaking hands in respect or in friendship.

Visionary and pathologically disproportionate, the film exudes a poetic perversion of a fairy tale. Just as for Cioran, so too for Miike, almost all diseases, physical and mental, have lyrical virtues, and if "Visitor Q", overall Miike's most sick film, ended with a good omen of family reconciliation, here there is no escape, as one dies before being born or shortly after birth without even reaching childhood, or if one survives, they are robbed of innocence still as a child (the father rapes the daughter).

It's reasonable to ask how far this prodigious filmmaker will go; for now, let us enjoy this other devastatingly perverse fairy tale.