[The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]
When introducing Japan Cuts’ recent screening of Toshiharu Ikeda’s hauntingly beautiful Mermaid Legend, festival programmer Alexander Fee described the movie as “elemental”—a thoroughly accurate summary of its bleak tone and surreal style. It is a shockingly graphic film—in terms of sex, violence, and sexual violence—but never gratuitously so. On the contrary, the often uncomfortably, confrontationally explicit subject matter serves a vitally important narrative purpose, conveying the sheer emotional weight of our heroine’s traumatic experiences. When she succumbs to the amorous advances of her slain husband’s friend in a moment of vulnerability, for example, the director shoots the scene in the manner of soft-core pornography; any potential titillation, however, is diluted by the audience’s knowledge that the man is in league with her enemies and intends to betray her (albeit reluctantly). Similarly, when she mercilessly butchers her spouse’s murderer (her first kill, but certainly not her last), literal geysers of gore erupt from every stab wound that she inflicts—the sort of macabre spectacle normally reserved for the Italian giallo genre.
Indeed “violation”—of personal boundaries, of the environment, of the social contract—emerges as the story’s most prominent and pervasive theme. It is a cautionary tale about power, privilege, and how otherwise “good” people can become complicit in their own oppression. It mourns the desecration of the natural world (and, in turn, the gradual erosion of the human spirit) at the hands of corporate greed and political ambition. It explores how injustice corrupts everything that it touches, culminating in a horrifyingly awesome display of indiscriminate bloodshed—a terrible act of vengeance (or perhaps divine retribution?) that is cathartic and tragic in equal measure.
Simultaneously sensual, grotesque, provocative, unapologetically melodramatic, and absolutely uncompromising in its nightmarish artistic vision, Mermaid Legend is a genuine unsung masterpiece—like a precious pearl half-buried beneath the sand at the bottom of the ocean, just waiting to be discovered by sufficiently adventurous cinephiles. Take the plunge; the water’s fine.
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