I felt pretty indifferent towards Pesce’s Eyes of My Mother and I’m about at the same place with this. I do like that it’s a complete 180 from that film visually and has more of an explicit, perverse sense of humour, plus I like all of the actors a lot. Re-purposing iconic giallo music cues throughout is a cheap move* though and you can probably guess where the story is heading just by being aware of Miike’s Audition (this is based on a novel by the same writer). All that being said I went into this with my arms crossed but it kind of won me over as it went on. There’s some vivid nightmare imagery and sound design that had me thinking of Tarsem’s The Cell which is always a plus. At least the dude knows how to keep his movies trim and to the point. Death to 100+ minute horror movies!

*I honestly don’t understand why more genre filmmakers don’t strive towards creating original scores instead of getting stuck in this feedback loop of nostalgic posturing. That’s the impulse that gave us those Goblin, Nicolai, Ortolani, Carpenter soundscapes in the first place after all. In thirty years are filmmakers still going to be sampling these same cues? Or just imitating Reznor/Ross and/or Disasterpeace? I think about this a lot!