This is a film about a man without a face. His arms and legs, bound with ropes, the disabled man is still without even a shudder in a white room. A series of unusual scenes in this room expresses what lies between memories, nightmares, and violent images.
It was a couple of minutes before I became aware of myself, of my body, responding to this with a fear I couldn’t totally account for until the film’s playful terrors and their seeming intentions, which I don’t want to pin down just yet, became undeniable. Miles of things to say about the overwhelming technique, the scent of its ideas (I want to program this alongside S3E8 “Gotta Light?”, with edibles, and see people writhe; I want to see it on every humanities syllabus concerned with “trauma” and/or “memory” and track what means people use to make sense of it) — but most of all what I can’t stop thinking about is the dread I felt before I’d even consciously clocked that dread. How exhilarating it felt to be so capably manipulated. The feeling is still alive in me now, days after the fact.
i wanna know how the fuck Takashi makes this shit
wildly impressed
Holy shit!? This scared the hell out of me. Claustrophobic and uncanny. Very much what I picture being trapped in hell would be like.
I don't recall ever bringing the idea of God into the equation when watching/thinking about a Takashi Ito movie, but now I see there might be some value in that. Not sure what else I can say other than this goes hard as hell, as viscerally affecting as you could expect from Ito but more packed with ideas than ever. Some absolutely killer train content in this one too.
On one hand it’s the most straightforward “horror movie” (both “narratively” and formally) I’ve seen from Ito, on the other, it struck me as almost unbearably personal and tragic for reasons I can’t quite articulate. Well, the man without an identity being bound to a room slowly filling with frames from Ito’s earlier movies while someone destroys a camera might have something to do with it.
Quite possibly the best movie about making movies ever made.
Bruh, wtf… Takashi Ito is a freaking genius… How does he manage to create these bizarre, terrifying, and yet so so so cool short films?
*5 minutes in when the toy train hits his feet, things start to get serious💀
God pierces the eye of the world; we are but mere specks in the midst of forces beyond understanding. Utterly sublime.
One frame, change a bunch of shit with great precision, move camera back, change lighting, blacken set, change shutter angle, change camera speed, shoot the next single frame pass. Continue making layers, elements, scenes, sequences, camera movements different from what you did yesterday, but so that it matches your work from the day before. Do this for many, many months. Analyze the daily footage with editing and personalized associations in mind, test, retest, make early edits, later edits, give finalized sequences to the score composer. Eventually, trusting your artistic ideas and trying experiments which you have no idea about, you re-edit different parts to make the integrated whole. Time it all, show it to those you trust, listen to them,…
I'd like to watch this and thoroughly jot down each beat that so fluidly constructs this work, working a web of images into the implosion of light, the finality of stillness and the total abstraction of movement. I'd need at least a day, but it'd be worth it.
takashi ito is better at creating, manipulating, and shifting an atmosphere than any other director i know of
Goes hard as hell, I've already liked the Ito I've seen but this is particularly excellent; additionally made me realize that "zone" is maybe my favorite English word? It's just great. Anyway, this is superb!
