Shinya Tsukamoto

Flesh, delirium, eros, violence come back again and again in the works of this visionary author who can process the anxieties and neuroses of modern times by turning them all into a sensual whirlwind before our eyes.
Human relationships are always conflictual and taken to the extremes. In A Snake of June (2002) the liberating sex of a couple in crisis comes after a troubled path that touched voyeurism, blackmail, and violence. More genre-specific films like Hiruko the Goblin and the two sequels to Tetsuo (these two more conventional horror films) alternate with very ornate films that dig deep into the human psyche.
Tsukamoto’s featurette Haze from 2005 sees the protagonist (played by Tsukamoto himself) trapped in a mental maze with seemingly no way out. In Kotoko (2011), a sick mother who suffers from double vision must fight to save her child. Hallucinated, disturbing cinema by Shinya Tsukamoto evolved up to this day, a form of mutation that is both the filmmaker’s style as well as a key for his audience to understand his work. Examples: short movie The Phantom of Regular Size (1986), featurette The Adventure of Denchu-Kozo (1986) show all the elements that will nothing less of explode in his first feature-length film, Tetsuo of 1989.
Tsukamoto’s eccentric style shows clearly in some of his latest work, too: Fires on the Plain (2014), on the horror of war, and Killing (2018), the story of a nineteenth-century samurai and conscientious objector.