25th Anniversary!
Due to graphic content, no one under 18 will be admitted to this screening.
A bullied teenage son who can’t control his own violent urges. A mother who is a drug-addicted prostitute. A daughter who has gone missing, and a father who records it all on home video. Into their midst steps Q: a house guest, witness, judge, jury and executioner. Iconic Japanese provocateur Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q is a deeply twisted descent into the collapse of a completely dysfunctional family.
It is no small feat to claim this film—from the director of Audition and Ichi the Killer—is probably Miike’s most transgressive: a surreal collision of melodrama, black comedy, and horror, with murder, incest, drug abuse, necrophilia, and all other assorted manner of nightmares on the table. Shot in less than a week for under $60,000 on MiniDV tape, Visitor Q was met with a firestorm of controversy when it was released in 2001. Restricted or outright blocked across Asia (and earning a country-wide ban in New Zealan), it never received a commercial release in its own country of production.
Visitor Q remains one of Miike’s most notorious and uncompromising films. It’s disgusting, hilarious, disturbing, and yet strangely beautiful, often cited by filmmakers like Ari Aster (Midsommar, Hereditary) as a formidable influence on their work. This is the movie you will be talking (or refusing to talk about about) for years to come.
2001, 84 minutes, Japan, In Japanese with English Subtitles, Unrated (Treat at NC-17), Digital
“Guaranteed to offend almost everyone except for card-carrying thrill-seekers.”
– Derek Elley, VARIETY
“Once every decade or so, you get zapped with a flick that’s so cringe-inducing you start to wonder whether it was actually made by a maniac.”
– Joe Bob Briggs, LAST CALL
“Even Miike devotees are likely to gawp open-mouthed at developments towards end of this one. If, that is, their eyes are still similarly ajar.”
– Neil Young, THE FILM LOUNGE
“Made for peanuts and shot on DV, this phenomenally provocative film may well turn out to be Miike's masterpiece.”
– TIME OUT
“Visitor Q is a harrowing piece of work that makes Alex’s rampages in A Clockwork Orange look tame by comparison. “
– Marc Savlov, THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE
