Organ (1996)

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Director: Kei Fujiwara

Screenplay: Kei Fujiwara

Cast: Kei Fujiwara; Kimihiko Hasegawa; Kenji Nasa; Ryu Okubo; Tojima Shozo; Shun Sugata

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #149

[SPOILER WARNINGS]

Synopsis: An attempt burst an illegal organ transplant ring by two detectives turns into a disaster. One, Tosaka, becomes a puppet for Saeki, the brother of a one-eyed woman Yoko who helps run the organ ring, a schoolteacher at an all girl's school with psychosexual desires. Locked up in a secret room of Saeki's school office, Tosaka is slowly turning half plant. Numata, the senior detective, is thrown off the case, wandering the streets half drunk in despair of the scenario that took place only to be drawn back in. Tosaka's twin brother wants to find out the truth about his brother, beginning a search with great bloodshed.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) was a significant film when it was first released. Whilst great cinema was coming out of Japan in the eighties, neglected still to this day, Tetsuo had a momentous impact globally when it premiered in the West. What is also of worth with Tetsuo is that it wasn't just one person of notice came from the film but three instead. Director Shinya Tsukamoto himself is underrated even still, in the sense that his career is a vast and complex one which went from the energised brutality of his debut to more psychological, introspected and fascinating work to match his debut, films arguably as good as Tetsuo and in the cases of Tokyo Fist (1995) and A Snake of June (2002) even better. One of the crew Shozin Fukui went on not so long after, having made short films beforehand, to have his own film career. Sadly only two of his films have ever made an appearance in the West but thankfully those films are the ones that need more attention to them, 964 Pinocchio (1991) and Rubber's Lover (1996), cyberpunk films where in contrast to Tsukamoto he pushed the notion of Tetsuo of physical ferocity even further - in acting, in camera movement and editing - and made it part of his plots, the extremes of human trauma taken their furthest when Rubber's Lover is about an underground experiment where a combination of sensory deprivation (including rubber costuming depriving the skin its ability to breath) and drugs leads to powerful psychic abilities.

The least known and most unsung is sadly, considering how we are still in an era where female directors are underappreciated, co-cinematographer, costumer and main actress of Tetsuo Kei Fujiwara. In Tetsuo, even if it leads to an unfortunate moment involving a penis drill, Fujiwara is immediately striking in appearance and how she acts. Her sole two films as director are even more striking, the extremity of the other two by way of spirituality, Cronenbergian body horror, and horrifying, grimy degradation.ID (2005), which was originally meant to be a sequel to her first film Organ and includes characters from the first film played by the same actors, took the spirituality further, based upon the concept that even the most sinful of people can be redeemed if they pray to Buddha for salvation, and that animals can not due to being unable to do so. It followed people around a  slaughterhouse as madness, poverty and violence leads to a woman (played by Fujiwara) turning into beast for horrible consequences.

Organ is more of a gristly crime-horror film of its era, Japanese cult cinema where genre is polymorphous and people like me viewed them both for how almost dangerous they were. That these films were more sexual, more weird, more kinky, more transgressive - and yet had seriousness and actual intelligence running through their veins in the best examples. These films could be unpredictable in how well made they were and how they lingered with you. Organ is probably to grimiest of the lot even next to what Takashi Miike at his more extreme moments did in the nineties. It evokes his yakuza films of the period, like Shinjuku Triad Society (1995), which were virtually by also feeling like a microcosm of an unknown Japan, an underground of yakuza to the poor, but manages to be more gross and grim.

It's a film which is already bound to cause people to need to take a hot shower afterwards before the body horror takes place. Fujiwara shoots a film where there's scenes taking place in rubbish strewn back alleys, in dank warehouses or amongst homeless, drunk men in a shell of a building. Where, as Numata wanders in his own cloud of anger in slum, his wife is left at home to pee just to the side of her bed whilst the son is on the stairs playing a handheld videogame. A sense of rundown, degraded Japan that a lot of these genres were quick to depict, bringing entirely distinct views of the country, genre cinema in Japan even today at the lowest budgeted films always feeling like travelogues at ordinary urban and country life, from the weed covered back alleys and isolated petrol stations. This is before you get to the illegal organ transplant organisation, done in filthy warehouse rooms even if there's sterile plastic sheeting around the improvised operating table, or the yakuza spilling people's blood in an underpass tunnel. The violence itself is gristly and utterly painful to witness, never done with a desire to please the viewer but fill them with disgust.

Then you get to the stranger aspects of Organ, such as one unfortunately police detective after the prologue having all his limbs hacked off and kept in Saeki's secret room in his school office, becoming a rotted hybrid of flesh and plant with festering ooze coming off him, something Saeki himself is suffering from. The surreal dream sequence where Fujiwara is birthed from a cocoon like a butterfly, writhing from it. Even the tone of the film is slow burn, intercutting between sequences and with a sense of the film at points falling into chaos with sometimes the slower pace will be replaced by a frantic sense of editing. The sense of a place on screen that feels melancholic and disturbed is felt throughout, bodies just appearing next to a countryside road or a schoolgirl floating in a river.

It's a work that's filthy and bleak but also concerned for its human characters. Even the villains, siblings Saeki and Yoko,  are created from a traumatic childhood even when their mother, enraged by their father's likely adultery, attempted to cut off the son's genitals and blinded the older daughter who tried to stop her. Death is horrible in Organ, not an aesthetic pleasure, and whilst that will be off putting for most surface level cult film lists, like the best of this Japanese cult cinema it's actually a drama with complexity that just happens to exist in a genre, one that's willing to push boundaries of violence and sexuality to make the viewer step back and actually react viscerally. There's even a tinge of psychodrama to attack the viewer mentally with Saeki's subplot, his office already a place of suspicion with butterflies on mass pinned to boards on the walls before anything else comes to mind. His own dark sexual desires have to be kept in check with his female students or a female teacher who's suspicious of him.

It's a film which feels like it came from the underground, able to stand out more due to how the Japanese industry allowed these types of films to thrive for cinema or straight-to-video. In Fujiwara's work as much as Fukui and Tsukamoto, you get cinema which reflects a wider scope than most cinema, even if bleak still a snapshot of the down-and-out, a lot of it feeling like its from the perspective of filmmakers who came from the working class, or at least ordinary families and decided to use the ordinary locations due to practicality but for a point. (Tsukamoto and his constant obsession with urban environments, Fukui having actors running around a supermarket in a constant frantic one-shot, or running through a busy and crowded urban centre pulling a prop stone pyramid along on a chain, to Fujiwara's ID feeling like a perverse domestic drama of a family of working class slaughterhouse butchers who live in near poverty). Whilst they decided to show their ordinary worlds through a hyper-fantastical extreme, ironically with a film like Organ you get as much a continuation of the type of cinema Shohei Imamura explored. Human entomology that just happened to inexplicably (but brilliantly) filter itself in extreme and/or idiosyncratic genre films, not that strange considering Takashi Miike himself was a student of Imamura's who worked on his film sets. Whilst sadly Japanese genre cinema has filtered through less interesting tangents, the post-irony of Sushi Typhoon the biggest culprits in recent decade in removing this type of realistic snapshots through irony, the best of these films from pinku cinema to horror hybrids like this feel like they're actually scrutinising the human condition under a microscope, one here in Organ leavened in nastiness but never feeling repugnant without reason.

Abstract Spectrum: Body Horror/Dreamlike/Grotesque

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Personal Opinion:

A film that understandably can put people off from it, but like Kei Fujiwara's in career in general, but is in dire need of reappraisal. Particularly when there are issues about the lack of women directing horror in general, Organ needs the re-evaluation drastically especially as Fujiwara escapes the confines of what a lot of female directors still have to be put through. That their work doesn't get lionised necessarily because of its virtues but because of their gender, and film critics tend to praise these films because they tackle the surface of subjects engendered to female creators rather than tackle them (and subjects beyond) with risk and a willingness to shake a viewer. Particularly with a film like The Babadook (2014) which, for all the interesting things it brings up that only its director could've brought to it, is stuck with all the clichés of jump scare horror and plot structure, a film like Organ is so alien to the stereotype of what a film directed by a woman could be in the whole, token irritance of critical praise. One that however is clearly made by this one woman with an obsession between this and ID is spirituality found even in the nastiest, bleakest of circumstances and overcoming even full body rot. Something so much more rewarding, so much more awesome and better because it's not nice, it's not pleasantly tackling obvious things, but a gruesome genre film which however feels like a female director-screenwriter putting onscreen only what she could. 

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