Miike’s film “Gozu” is a film I can only shrewdly describe as “a mind fuck”. The description for “Gozu” described a yakuza gangster looking for his insane yakuza boss to stop him. I went in expecting “Goodfellas” and when I was finished I ended up with “Eraserhead”. But that’s Takashe Miike for you. He never gives you what you expect from him, and though I received the polar opposite of what the film’s plot described, “Gozu” was still an experience. Miike’s film is very much in the vein of Lynch with a film that bears a simple plot but then goes out of its way to be weird, and surreal. Whether it’s watching a man with a partly white face, or a yakuza with a penchant for sticking ladles up his behind while he has sex, Miike loves to play with the audience and he makes it perfectly clear that you’re watching his movie. And the message comes through. Only in a Miike film could you see a woman lactating herself in front of a naked man. Apart from the utterly odd imagery, Miike also manages to serve up some rather unusual direction that never really made too much sense, but it seemed to be what he was going for with this. He conducts his scenes from the oddest angles, including one that’s taken from an aerial angle of a dimmed red light bulb looking down at a partly open room.

I have to admit I was rather disappointed by Miike’s film mainly because it never really seems to want to have a coherent story. Though it’s very much in the spirit of Lynch, Lynch’s films, even the most confusing of them, had a point. They had an aim, a mystery to decode. Miike’s film is just a very random occurrence of scenarios that never really make any sense. Even when alluding heavily towards birth, and life, which are the central themes of the film’s story, “Gozu” just rambles on and on, meandering to different sub-plots, and characters without a clear point in sight. Miike’s film is heavily reliant on more shocking imagery such as the boss who has a fetish for sticking ladles up his butt during sex, and the final scenes which are utterly mind-blowing, but through it all it feels so completely random and without a bridge to connect them to discover what the writer and Miike has to say. Half of the time during, I don’t think even Miike himself seemed to get understand of the imagery here. But aside from that, most of the surrealism would have been tolerable if the pacing and energy weren’t so dim and slow. “Gozu” is one of the least interesting mysteries I’ve seen in a while, and sadly it just isn’t one of Miike’s strongest.

While Miike serves up more examples of his sick mind with a seriously insane original film, I just didn't find it to be one of his stronger installments. While "Gozu" has its moments of sheer entertainment, many times it's just a rambling and incoherent mess without a point in sight.