I experienced "Visitor Q" the other day... first of all, if you are faint of heart, please do not watch this film. It is uncomfortably graphic and very disturbing! A lot of the movie was so uncomfortable and visceral that it made me avert my eyes and cover my face in shame, but I believe that that very reaction may have been the point of the film, in one sense or another. It is obviously a very heavy-handed commentary on how exploitative and uncaring society and the media can be.
While I did not enjoy the more graphic parts of the film, I enjoyed it as a cohesive tale, like all other Miike films––the film is beguiling, bizarre and beautiful. Maybe there's something wrong with me, because despite such shocking aspects, it intrigued me more than disturbed me, though it is considered to be a grandmaster out of all of the grotesque cinematic films. Most of all, what I liked the most in the film is the character "Q"... Kazushi Watanabe was very striking and picturesque in the role of the mysterious visitor. The character of "Q" is intriguing, he acts as catalyst or like a Greek muse, but is completely detached from humanity––a nameless spectator, yet the pivotal character of the story.
It took me a few days to process the film because it was a tour-de-force of stunning imagery and a pure, unbridled disgust pit. It's an example of the saying, "the sacred and profane": "Visitor Q" embodies that phrase perfectly, teetering much more towards its vulgarity than beauty. My takeaway from the film is that this dysfunctional family had their layers peeled back and then they were able to become reborn by getting in touch with their primal urges, rather than the complicated wiring and programming that we are all forced to adjust ourselves to in human society.
At the beginning of this film, I expected to hate it, but I didn't. I heard that people said to skip "Visitor Q" in the Takashi Miike filmography and watch "The Happiness of the Katakuris" instead... but, strangely enough, I ended up favoring this movie over that one. I feel very emotionally connected to Miike's works, especially when they are more raw and real. When I watched "Kuime", I felt a sense of déjà vu, as if I had seen it before––the scenes felt familiar, and I had that sense again with "Visitor Q"! His films are certainly something to behold, he's a very talented director, though I wonder if it's okay for some of these scenes and ideas to find their way onto the big screen...
Watching "Visitor Q" emboldened me to write about darker subjects in my new novel, not nearly as freaky as this film, but one of my newer stories was going to talk about the subject of incest and is somewhat based off of a true story, not mine but a story loosely based off of someone I knew about. I think that I felt afraid to talk about the story before, even though my mind yearned to write about it. Sometimes, when I hear about shocking things, my brain processes it better when I write about it through characters and fictional stories, so I am going to start working on it again!