Visitor Q

Made for peanuts and shot on DV, this phenomenally provocative film may well turn out to be Miike's masterpiece. A mysterious stranger (Watanabe, himself a talented indie director) moves into an ultra-dysfunctional middle-class home - and destroys it by leading each member of the Yamazaki family to his or her most secret, solipsistic desire. Only one of them (the bullied son, given to beating up his mother) ultimately has the courage to break free. The junkie mother (Uchida, a famous author) learns to get high on hyper-lactation and rediscovers her maternal role, welcoming her erring husband and daughter back to suckle at her breasts: a regression to infantilism more scary than any of the preceding incest, violence, murder and necrophilia. Funnier and less cerebral than Pasolini's Theorem, its obvious model, this is perhaps the most devastating attack on the nuclear family ever made.