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Masumi Miyazaki, Issei Ishida, Rie Kuwana, Hirochi Oguchi, Tomorowo Taguchi ... see more see more... , Fujiko , Hiroshi Ohguchi , Madame Regine , Mai Takahashi

From the director of the cult hit Suicide Club comes an unsettling look at the life of a sexually-abused adolescent whose inability to distinguish her mother's pleasure from her own pain sends her dow... read more read more...n a dark and surreal path. Sexually molested by her father Gozu (Hiroshi Oguchi) and mentally tormented by her jealous mother Sayuri (Masumi Miyazaki), twelve-year old Mitsuko (Rie Kuwana) is locked in a cello case and forced to watch her parents perform a series of intimate acts. When Mitsuko's mother dies as the result of a fatal fall, the deeply disturbed young girl begins to believe that she has, in fact, been transformed into her own mother. Her father viewing the death of his wife and mental malaise of his daughter as a motivator to ramp up the incestuous relations with his increasingly unhinged offspring, Mitsuko eventually ends up restricted to a wheelchair following a failed suicide attempt. Later, it begins to appear that the preceding events were nothing more than the details of a new novel by reclusive, wheelchair-bound author Taeko (also Miyazaki). When Taeko's trusted editor places his fey personal assistant Yuji (Issei Ishida) in charge of the successful writer, the probing Yuji launches a clandestine investigation into Taeko's background while simultaneously being forced to satisfy her deepest and darkest fantasies. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

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81% liked it

1,526 ratings

Unrated, 1 hr. 48 min.

Directed by: Sion Sono

Release Date: October 14, 2005

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DVD Release Date: March 6, 2007

Stats: 174 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (174)

  • kiriyamakazou
    July 21, 2009
    kiriyamakazou
    In the style of his previous effort, Suicide Circle, Sion Sono deals with a difficult and dark subject in a horrific and slightly perverse way. He handles the scenes of child abuse with a twisted sense of genius. Our protagonist says how when she is abused she "becomes" her mothe... read morer. In the visual medium of film, this literally happens. Although this makes it possible for us to endure, the performances never allow us to forget who the character is meant to be. The plot soon starts to become even more twisted as it is not clear what is real, what is part of a novel and so on. There are dream sequences, memories and prose all tangling together to make a very unique narrative. At the end it all goes a bit too far and is bogged down by excessive exposition (I didn't need the dialogue, the unbuttoning of the shirt was enough to put the pieces together). The music is also fantastic, bridging the gap between Fargo's magnificent theme and the music of Amelie. It's certainly a difficult watch, but a rewarding one.
  • ceWEBrity
    September 27, 2008
    ceWEBrity
    Many call Suicide Club Sion Sono's finest film, and you'd be hard-pressed to argue that it had a lot of great qualities. But for all its imagination, it was incoherent and the only thing that really left any impact was the filming. Strange Circus, on the other hand, is the produc... read moret of a filmmaker who has matured and found focus, a wonderfully honed work that manages to be complex without purposeful obfuscation. It treads an interesting line between bizarre exploitation flick and schizophrenic, tormented narrative, and is one of the more unique films I've seen recently.

    The first half hour of the film really gets you in the gut. Basically, it's about a young girl named Mitsuko who is forced to watch her parents have sex, raped repeatedly by her father who is ALSO the principal of her school, then chased and beaten by her gradually maddening mother every day to the point where Mitsuko tries to attempt suicide. And most of you have probably stopped reading by now.

    This all is horrifically lurid, but it turns out to be the creation of a writer named Taeko, a paraplegic nymphomaniac who refuses to appear in public. It's through this that Sion Sono finds his justification for doing all these horrible things to a young girl - the implication is that, despite being a work of fiction, this all happened to Taeko - but it's still uncomfortable to sit through and that's one of my problems with the film. Kudos to the young actress, who can't have had much fun on this shoot.

    Anyway, the fact that Taeko is writing this way over-the-top depiction of household abuse lets Sono get away with all sorts of fun stuff. There's this ridiculously bad circus metaphor running through the whole movie, and we get to see a variety of fun-house freaks parading around in Mitsuko's psyche. There are really ribald, decidedly unsexy depictions of sex, all sorts of self-mutilation hijinks, and even chainsaw dismemberments. It's basically Suicide Club firing on all cylinders, four parts art and two parts badness.

    This all is amplified by Masumi Miyazaki, who plays both Mitsuko's mother Sayuri and Taeko. It is an absolutely beyond-the-call performance. There are so many emotions she has to express, so much to keep her head above, and she does it all perfectly. She knows when to play it straight and when to take it into Camp Land, but most effectively, she knows how to blur the line between the two, which allows for all sorts of reinterpretation and theorizing. She simply makes the movie. I was a little skeptical of her performance at first because it's in a different language, but next to Issei Ishida, who plays the assistant editor and body artist assigned to find the truth about Taeko, she's still fantastic. On the other hand, his acclimation to the insane final act is a lot less difficult to believe.

    The ending, on that note, is a little long-winded, but there's so much room for richness and speculation. Unlike Suicide Club, this movie actually lends itself to rational thought, instead of throwing things that seem artistic and meaningful at the viewer and letting them cobble something stupid together. Or maybe I'm just reading into this much more than I did Suicide Club. Goddamn it, Sono, the things you're doing to me.
  • cacutshaw
    April 16, 2010
    cacutshaw
    Another amazing film from Sion Sono.  I still need to see Hazard and Noriko?s Dinner Table, but from what I?ve seen, Sono has recently shot up my list of favourite working directors.
  • sleepykiss
    February 8, 2010
    sleepykiss
    Nightmarish, surreal, disturbing, & extremely sad. When you think you understand the plot, he throws something bizarre at you again. This is Sion Sonos best flick as of yet (much better then the SUICIDE CLUB.)
  • zombiezimmer
    July 24, 2009
    zombiezimmer
    Very disturbing. This film's story, the twists, and the scenery can give you feelings of being traumatized. It loses one star because
  • iamthethinman
    March 25, 2009
    iamthethinman
    Of course, I watch a ton of J-horror. Suicide Club/Circle/whatever was one of the ones that caused a clamor and got me interested. Then I watched it and felt a little ripped off. It seemed like it could have been great if it focused. I?m used to the esoteric unfolding of crucial ... read morestory points and the pattern of cryptic endings, but that movie showed good enough potential that I was ready for the ?change of pace? that was Strange Circus.

    So, enter what I would consider morbid/perverse noir but is the most luminous and vibrant of visual assembly. It really tries hard to bring the broken linear timeline and confuse, which works. Then, when the pieces fall together, it makes sense overall ? except when you look at what these people have gone through. It follows the female lead, but gives next to no background, except for the _____, of anyone else which might have helped set up the story and mood ? maybe creating better atmosphere. And while it is wonderful to look at, Miike killed that with Django. Kurosawa (2nd) and Miike are now the par.

    I really want more directors with visual flare and a sense for scene and editing direct something they don?t script. This guy is one of them.
  • heavyd2000
    November 11, 2008
    heavyd2000
    The film David Lynch wishes he could make. Brilliant. Sono is one of the best director's working today. This story is horrorfying. It's stunning to look at and the acting is just great. He has grown since suicide club.
  • jes25924
    June 30, 2008
    jes25924
    Speaking of violence, Sion Sono(director of Suicide Club)'s latest film Strange Circus, is an erotic horror story, steeped in incest, pedophilia, trans-sexuality, and screaming. Sometimes were in a carnival, other times walking down a blood covered hallway that looks like the ins... read moreide of a giant monster, other times within a cello case watching our parents do the deed, or gazing at a creaky carousel which never quite works. These images are hammered down over and over again, punctuated always by more crying and screaming, until like many modern Japanese horror films, the narrator is proved to be unreliable and then identity's of the characters go switching around. Its a lot more focused than Suicide Club, more visual texture and beauty, cleaner, crisper performances mostly. I've heard this mentioned as part of the "ero-goru"(erotic grotesque nonsense) a growing genre in Japan in porn, literature, and film; Giger, Lovecraft, and Sada Abe mixed in a wet dream. This film does attempt to delve not only into the genre, but the production of the genre itself (who writes it and why), however by the end, were given a revenge story that doesn't seem to fit well with the subdued nihilist realism of the rest of the movie, unlike Suicide Club it doesn't invoke laughter or a sense of the tragicomic or socially relevant satire, it's just grotesque, then kinda stupid, still pretty, but less erotic. It almost had me, but it's insistence on cliché in the end(chainsaws and chains and fake limbs), make it lose any redemptive value. Gozu and Visitor Q, are better samples of the genre, if better is the right word.
  • kingmob6
    May 26, 2007
    kingmob6
    Beautiful looking surreal film, filled with grim, ugly situations that will make you cringe as you marvel at how lovely the film looks.

    Recommended.

View All Kimyô na sâkasu (Strange Circus) Reviews

Critic Reviews

Kam Williams
May 3, 2007
Kam Williams, NewsBlaze

How often can you say that a psychological thriller is as intriguing as it is titillating? Full Review

Russell Edwards
February 23, 2012
Russell Edwards, Variety

Click to read the article Full Review

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