Takashi Miike’s "Imprint"

An hour-long surreal horror film called “Imprint” is Takashi Miike’s contribution to the Masters of Horror series. It takes place (vaguely) in 19th-century Japan, but everything is spoken in English, and it’s very sort of ahistorical; it’s much more about a modern aesthetic interpretation of the times that the story takes place in rather than any real historical basis. Based on a traditional Japanese ghost story, an older American man travels to an island, where a brothel is kept, in search of his long-lost love, Komomo, who he promised he would take away one day long ago. Once there, he meets a disfigured/beautiful prostitute who tells him the story of (and many lies about) her life and Komomo’s. The girl’s appearance/disfigurement reminds me a bit of Yotsuya Kaidan, one of my favorite ghost stories.

This movie has such beautiful visual imagery. As Miike is known for, it combines eroticism and beauty, the grotesque and the macabre: there are cringe-worthy torture scenes and the incredibly intense cruelty of characters towards one another; and beautiful, imaginative visuals and cinematography that make it impossible to resist the pull of the movie. Totally perverse. Gorgeous girls, upon which the most horrible things are inflicted, including this weird erotic/absolutely horrific rope-bondage scene, and all the while there’s that eerie stillness and somehow elegant, serene quality that sets Miike apart from other, noisier horror movie makers.

I don’t know if the story or dialogue is that great, but it should be seen just for its visual element. I love how all the other prostitutes were contrasted with the main girl by their hair (huge, stylized wigs with giant hair pins) and clothes all being red while hers were blue. I really wanted to find some good pictures from the movie, but I couldn’t, really. I particularly liked the role of the main girl (unnamed), she was so alluring, and I loved her voice. And yet she became kind of repulsive later on; beauty and repulsion are constantly mixed in the female figures in this movie.

One of the downsides is that I thought the man’s performance was kind of amateurish, rather one-sided, and his voice didn’t really fit in at all, you could barely understand him at times. He seemed more like an amateur stage actor acting with misguided gusto or something, trying to come off as enigmatic, eccentric, and haunting/haunted. The “twist” at the end is also just bizarre and silly.

Anyway, the movie holds a lot of interest for me because of its imagination, visual concepts, and quirks. I think Takashi Miike gets categorized as a “B-movie” director a lot of times (which is bizarre whenever I hear that), but for me his work has a lot of beauty, I couldn’t ever see it as somehow bad or low-quality because it’s “shocking.” I’d give the movie maybe a 7 out of 10.

Tags: asian horror, bizarre, colorful, film reviews, surreal, takashi miike, torture