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| Images courtesy of Radiance Films |
The first time I encountered Takashi Miike’s digital video
microbudget feature Visitor Q was on the Tokyo Shock DVD port released
in the early 2000s in the US at the height of the Japanese provocateur’s
popularity in the West. A loose
postmodern reworking of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema which involved a
mysterious drifter played by Terence Stamp who visits a well-to-do family and
proceeds to seduce each and every family member irrespective of their sexual
orientation, Visitor Q was one of five films Miike directed in 2001
alongside his manga shocker Ichi the Killer and his musical horror
comedy remake of The Quiet Family with The Happiness of the Katakuris. One of two digital video films by the
director that year, the other being the lesser regarded Family, Visitor
Q was more or less a small shoot by a professional film crew ordinarily
used to working on real theatrical features.
Despite the technical limitations including the occasional
peeking of boom mikes into shots in the native 1.33:1 fullscreen ratio lensed
on a consumer grade Sony DCR-VX1000 handheld camera by Hideo Yamamoto, for
awhile there, the insane and outrageously relentlessly transgressive volcanic eruption
of depravity and madness was in fact my favorite Takashi Miike film. While indeed perhaps his roughest and most
perversely twisted work, underneath all of the sickness is an oddly
conservative return to preserving the family unit even if that means some
characters end up dead or defiled along the way. For years the film was only available on DVD
and though British boutique label Radiance Films tried to get the rights to Visitor
Q deals kept falling through until Australian boutique label New Wave Video
worked out meeting up with Takashi Miike and securing a new 1080i digital scan
of the original MiniDV master tape. Premiering
in June 22nd of 2026, that version came out in a deluxe limited
edition including special liner notes by The Movie Sleuth’s very own Michelle
Kisner. Shortly thereafter, Radiance
Films announced their own edition, presumably a port of the same 2025 scan, for
release on Blu-ray in the United Kingdom and United States.
Previously covered around the time I first started with the
site on a Home Invasion film article, Visitor Q follows disgraced news
reporter Kiyoshi Yamazaki (Kenichi Endō in perhaps
his greatest screen performance) videotaping prostitutes and troubled youths
before finding the ultimate subject in his own son Takuya (Jun Mutō)
who is frequently being bullied by classmates and therefore takes the anger and
abuse out on his ailing heroin-addicted mother Keiko (manga artist Shungicu
Uchida). Meanwhile their teenage daughter
Miki (Fujiko) has run away from home and father Kiyoshi’s exploits with his MiniDV
camera draw in an ex-mistress and colleague Asako (Shōko Nakahara). Somewhere along
the way a mysterious drifter only known as Visitor Q (director Kazushi Watanabe
who also created the film’s animated trailer) begins ingratiating himself into
the family unit uninvited unannounced and soon he becomes a catalyst of all
sorts of changes that soon erupt into transgressive pandemonium which will have
you laughing uncontrollably at some of the worst things you can ever imagine
seeing in a standard motion picture feature.
A film that starts off quiet and slow, methodical while
working in one unspeakable atrocity into the narrative after another before
blowing its top like a Mount St. Helens eruption that won’t stop spewing lava
forth, Visitor Q is hilarious, horrific, brilliantly detailed and an
explosive Molotov Cocktail of a little video feature. Originally intended for V-cinema before going
into a limited theatrical release, Visitor Q written by Itaru Era and
produced and distributed by CineRocket’s Love Cinema for exclusive distribution
in the Shimokitazawa theater in Tokyo, it is the kind of Japanese provocation
certain to blow the doors out of the back of cinema entrances. A movie that has engendered wild and hysterical
reactions to everyone I’ve shown it to over the next twenty-five years, Takashi
Miike’s epic quickie though shot in seven days is the film of powder keg that
can go off at a moment’s notice and anything can happen thereafter.
Kenichi Endō, it goes without saying,
is a wild and untethered force of demonic nature here as the father Kiyoshi
starting out initially as broken and withdrawn until his time spent around Visitor
Q (played with debonair detached cool by Kazushi Watanabe) unlocks something
buried deep inside his soul until he’s a literal walking stick of
dynamite. An actor unafraid to put
himself out there in a dark and twisted light whether it means portraying
implied incest, sodomy, rape, murder, necrophilia and child murder, so much
hinges on his performance here it becomes crucial over time. I’ve seen Kenichi Endō in other Miike films
since as well as playing the godfather in The Raid 2 but Visitor Q will
probably always be his best and most fearless hour. Equal attention goes to Shungicu Uchida as
the battered mother who finds her sexual reawakening in being able to lactate
on command. In fact both of the parent
characters here are played as broken down hovels in dire need of repair and
rejuvenation, something the titular cool Visitor Q delivers either
accidentally or calculatedly (we’re never sure). And of course the one who endures both the
most humiliation and had the hardest time holding her laughter back is Shōko
Nakahara who puts up with, well, more than most other actresses ever would for a
sick and twisted black comedy.
While I’m still hanging onto my Tokyo
Shock DVD for having a faster more fluid frame rate than the newer scan, the
video and grain levels on this new 1080i master translate wonderfully onscreen
in the new Radiance Films Blu-ray disc.
What sets this edition apart from the New Wave Video release however are
the inclusion of three new interviews conducted by Radiance Films with Takashi
Miike, Kenichi Endō and Shōko Nakahara which not only paint a full picture of
Miike as a director but also how both of the leading actors consider it to mutually
be their best works. Shōko Nakahara has
to put up onscreen with being stripped naked, murdered and her body defiled yet
has nothing but fond memories of the shoot and how hard it was for her to hold
back her laughter against the wild energies of Kenichi Endō. Also included is a video essay by Kat
Ellinger and a running audio commentary with Takashi Miike expert Tom Mes. While missing a number of the newly filmed
extras included on the New Wave release, their own subset of unique extras make
this an essential companion piece for customers like me who still have the
Tokyo Shock DVD and the New Wave BD.
Radiance Films just doled out probably their most extreme film since Viva La Muerte! as well as one of their gut busting funniest movies ever with effectively
their second toe dipping into Takashi Miike’s catalog. A gift that keeps on giving and one of the
most painterly and picturesque digital video films leading up to David Lynch’s Inland
Empire.
--Andrew Kotwicki
