Saturday, December 8, 2007

EM aka Embalming (1999)

You possibly know Shinji Aoyama as the director of art house films like Eureka, which won't prepare you for EM in the slightest. It's a kind of unholy union of art house/thriller/mystery film, with a plot containing illegal organ trade, stolen heads, embalming, the possibility of eternal existence, multiple personality disorder, conspiracies, father complexes, weird sects, human experiments, and everything else you could possibly think of, written by a Japanese Ross Macdonald on speed, but directed by Shinji Aoyama (with an unexpected sense of humor) on Valium.
If this sounds confusing, you haven't seen the actual film, which throws at least one mad idea per minute at you, all the while trying to stay ponderous, slow and meditative. Aoyama's way of concentrating his shots on weird, seemingly non-intuitive details doesn't make the plot any clearer, instead producing a unique moodiness.







Darlings of the day:
"We'll be disgraced if we display his body without his head."

"Everyone seems to have been totally brain-fucked!"

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