Twisted Sister

ANTENNA

Written and directed by
Starring

Reviewed by Matthew C. Brown
September 9 2003

I think I kind of loved this movie. It was a bit like waking up one morning and realizing that you're in love with someone you thought you didn't really like: I spent a lot of this flick feeling somewhat underwhelmed. And then it hit me.

Antenna is, at its core, a standard melodrama about a shattered family dealing with the disappearance of their 8-year-old girl several years ago. The Japanese love their austere, emotionally distant treatments of horrifying subject matter, and for much of Antenna, we are going no further than that.

What makes Antenna the best movie I've seen today are two sequences in the film that are unbelievably intense, and absolutely riveting.

The first begins with our hero, Yuchiro, tied up in a sack, watching his dominatrix, Naomi, berate another of her clients. It proceeds into a mindfuckingly ballsy confrontation between Yuchiro and Naomi that's soaked in blood, sweat, and semen. The entire film gets kicked up several notches of sophistication by the end of this scene.

The second amazing sequence is really the entirety of the second-last reel of the film, wherein Yuchiro (again with Naomi's help) confronts the reality of the disappearance of his sister, and all of the incredibly perverse sexual undercurrents that were triggered by that single event in his life. While this reel unspooled, I was literally shaking.

As you've discerned by now, beneath that staid Japanese spartanism lies a wellspring of sexual perversity that drives this film in bizarre, profound and complicated ways. Antenna wades through sadomasochism, pedophilia and incest, always clinging to shocking kernels of truth. It also, however, moves through circles of metaphysics in surprising ways as Yuchiro arcs closer and closer to unlocking the pain and guilt within himself.

Akemi Kobayashi is wonderful as Naomi, in that her character is absolutely nothing more than a catalyst. Kobayashi understands this, and therefore plays the character to a T is an empty vessel, a cypher into which Yuchiro plunges himself in his search for the truth. And in the lead role of the film, Ryo Kase is balls-out fantastic: this is a courageous performance in the face of a very dark exploration of human nature.