Friday, June 13, 2014

Koji Wakamatsu's Caterpillar (2010)

I guarantee you that once I tell you the premise of Caterpillar, you will just roll your eyes and claim it as another cruel Japanese film that probably has Takashi Miike's sick, twisted, and violent humor written all over it. Caterpillar is about a wife (Shinobu Terajima) who finds her husband (Keigo Kasuya) returning from the Sino-Japanese war as a war hero but with a horribly mutilated body in which he is reduced to a torso with no limbs, deaf and mute, and burns covering half of his face. Sounds like another crude Miike film am I right? Contrary to what you might expect from the synopsis, Caterpillar is a tense critique of Japanese nationalism, militarism, and male dominance told through a domestic melodrama between a husband and wife in the dreadful World War II era.

Read more at JapanCinema.net!