By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. After shooting 15 movies and two TV shows this decade alone, hyper-prolific renegade filmmaker Sono Sion was rushed to a Tokyo hospital in February, where emergency surgery was performed to save his life.
Mitsuko seems delighted, but a former high-school classmate recognizes the danger. At times it feels like the relationship between an artist and their audience. Or, as we see in the memorable scene where Joe reinvents himself as a beloved pop star who assaults his band members, the relationship between an uncompromising artist and their collaborators.
When a pair of wannabe filmmakers discover Shin busking on the streets of Tokyo, they invite him to join their DIY collective. The boys have the scrappy energy that Sono himself has relied on for the last 30 years, they just lack his genius for generating story ideas. Joe being the kind of seductive charlatan who can turn any crowd of people into a cult of personality, he decides to bankroll the film, and eventually even strong-arms his way into directing it.
Families are destroyed, people are debased, and everyone is turned into mulch for the creative energy that binds them together; things eventually tip into a kind of insanity that will be familiar to longtime Sono fans, with one long sequence illustrating the specifics of how a human body might be diced into pieces and liquidated in order to hide the evidence.
Even the most extreme DIY filmmakers are seldom this feral or willing to follow their muse into the darkness. Fingers crossed Sono will continue to do just that in the future. You will be redirected back to your article in seconds.
