The ethereally beautiful Ryuhei Matsuda plays Jun Ariyoshill, sent to an impossibly photogenic juvenile detention centre after he kills and subsequently horrifically mutilates a guy after a one-night stand. Although the movie contains some startling imagery (Juns heart pierced by a ray of sunlight, the warden's office within a picture frame, the seductively geometric communal cells) I found it difficult to stay with this extraordinary piece of cinema. Part of my mind was screaming emperor's new clothes! whilst my visual cortex was being lovingly massaged. You can forget about conventional plotting character development and expository dialogue for, as one review I read said "its a Miike film" -what do you expect? Well, if you expect to be; Frustrated. Confused. Misdirected. but also Awed. Startled. Exhilarated & Exhausted. This will be right up your street. And if you can't tell whether I liked it or not -that's probably because I can't either, but Im sure as hell going to find it hard to lose some of the weird, seductive images that this movies left in my brain.
