Cold Fish

The celebrated director of Love Exposure (ranked as best of the decade by many fans) offers up two-and-a-half hours of full-throttle hysteria, splattered in eye-gougingly garish hues. Shamoto, the mild-mannered proprietor of a tropical fish store, finds himself and his family drawn into the orbit of a jovial fellow fish dealer named Murata, a serial killer who gleefully slaughters their business competitors; Shamoto reluctantly becomes the murderer’s apprentice and his wife becomes Murata’s sex toy. Beneath the film’s copious helping of blood, bones, and innards lies a post-economic bubble ero guro parable about the ordinary fascism of contemporary Japan’s middle class.