In this quiet though extremely black comedy, the family that slays together stays together. Regular fans of Miike will be accustomed to his loud & over the top exquisitely violent gangster films, but this tale of a psychotic murdering family has an Addams Family lightheartedness. Son being bullied? Photograph it for fun, then kill his tormentors!
There are scenes of hysterically funny but appallingly vulgar scope, like when the dad (Kiyoshi Yamazaki) gets his pecker stuck inside the young woman he has killed & plans to hack up, or when the scarred mom (Keiko Yamazaki) starts lactating wildly while screwing Visitor Q (Kazushi Watanabe) until there are gallons & gallons of slippery milk sloshing to all corners of the floor. Drugs, rape, incest are all subjects of inappropriate but wonderful humor.
How much the anti-messiahnic titular character of Visitor Q really has to do with this dysfunctional family reconnecting via glorious madness is uncertain. All that is for sure is that the family was falling apart until they learned to enjoy mayhem separately & as a unit.
When we watch one of Miike's violent gangster epics, the kitschy punky psycho characters are not readily identified with, so we enjoy watching abnormal people doing abnormal things. But in Visitor Q we are presented with an ordinary family, one which average middleclass folks can readily relate to. When they commit abnormal acts, it is much more about abnormality penetrating the normal world; we might even relate to & find pleasing the fantasy of an average family devoted to mayhem. If Miike means in most of his films to say "there are dangerous people out there," in Visitor Q he shows that there are violent dangerous in here too. They could be our neighbors. They could even be ourselves.
It's hard to know if Miike is critical of his characters (I suspect he likes them as much as will the viewer), but there is an element of Luis Bunuel in the manner by which Miike just assumes ordinary people are ordinarily stark raving insane. The influence of Pier Paolo Pasolini is likewise evident (Visitor Q is ultimately Miike's take on Pasolini's 1968 black & white surreal Teorema).
The family's dysfunction is not perfectly cured until the end when the Mom has become a lactating goddess for everyone. We know this family will love each other always, cover for each other's faults or behaviors, protect each other, & undoubtedly continue to get away with havoc in the community. And the moral seems to be, "Ain't it grand."
No matter how much forwarning one has about this film, I don't believe any viewer can help but be a little shocked, if not overawed, but after the first few acts, it's easy to go along with it all, embracing rather than being horrified. Visitor Q is my favorite of Miike's bizarre film legacy. On those occasions when he makes a really crappy film (& he makes so many so fast, a percentage cannot help but be crappy), I just remind myself "But he made Visitor Q" & he's easier to forgive for his lapses.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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