Visitor Q (2001)

Here's a film that separates the men from the boys. It opens with a nine-minute videotaped interlude between a businessman and a young prostitute, which would be uncomfortable enough if it weren't also established that the happy couple is also father and daughter. And it only gets sicker from there, tearing through a catalog of atrocities that includes beatings, heroin abuse, copious lactation, murder, necrophilia and a strange man who likes to hit people over the head with large rocks. So why would anyone want to watch this? It's much more moral than you'd expect, actually -- it's a caustic black comedy about family dysfunction that suggests the way to repair society is through the assumption of traditional family roles. Take the necrophilia scene, for instance -- it's on one level shock for shock's sake, but it plays out as both an absurdly hilarious comedy setpiece and an emotional awakening for the previously-ineffectual father figure. In Audition, one character declaims "Japan is dead"; here, director Takashi Miike reveals that there may be hope after all. It's the strangest argument ever put forth for family values, and it's also mesmerizing cinema.

Grade: A-