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Title: Strange Circus
(aka Kimyo no Sakasu)
Directed by: Sion Sono
Written by: Sion Sono
Release date: ??-??-2005
Running Time: 108 minutes

Sion Sono, one of the most influential Japanese directors in the last decade in Japan, has created a cult following all over the world. But to no wonder; Sono’s movies are usually chock-full of unusual imagery, confusing plot-lines, and a hefty amount of sadistic strangeness to boot. This style kick-started with his first film that got oversees attention, Suicide Circle, and now continues to evolve as this absolutely magnificent piece of artwork surfaces, that is Strange Circus.

Strange Circus starts out with a young girl Mitsuko, a disturbed twelve year old who has nightmares about a strange circus (d’oh). She dreams about a circus filled with acrobats, cross-dressers, and cosplayers, and an audience which is mildly interested in the chain of events. She dreams that she is volunteering for an act in which she is to be executed, with her head chopped off. But before she is executed, every time, she wakes up.

One night as she wakes up from the circus dream, she hears moaning and screaming sounds from outside. Curious, she follows the sounds to be coming out of her parents’ room. As she opens to their room to peak inside, she finds her parents in an intricately awkward position while making love.

The next day at school, Mitsuko’s father, who happens to be the principal, calls her to his office. There, he holds her close and tells her what a good girl she is and how her grades are slipping. He tells her to sit down on the seat and turn around, and as she does, her father molests her.

At home, each night, the father locks Mitsuko in a cello case with a hole from which she can peek outside, and puts it in his room so that Mitsuko could watch his father making love to his wife. Then, the father puts his wife in the cello case and makes her watch him making love to his daughter in turn. This keeps happening every day and every night, until one day when the man’s wife Sayuri starts becoming jealous of her daughter.

Sayuri starts beating Mitsuko for trivial things and keeps trying to kill her. One day, in another offense frenzy to her daughter, she falls down the stairs and dies. After the funeral, Mitsuko’s abuse from her father becomes even more accentuated and one day, in a desperate attempt, Mitsuko jumps off of her school building.

Now, this is where the story becomes really messed up. We find out that everything we’ve seen so far was only part of a fictional novel a middle-aged woman is writing, and far from reality. Sadly enough, this second storyline is equally as disturbing to the mind with its slow-as-if-dead pace. Here, Takeo is a mysterious writer who is immensely popular all around Japan because of her hugely disturbing story about a young girl named Mitsuko, which appears in all of her novels.

But hold the phone, this storyline is actually not the real one and the first one was indeed true! Or was it?

The movie is total madness. There is not a single character in this movie which would be considered relatively normal. And not only that, the film in construction is just simply insane. There are three alternate realities happening at the same time, each with their own uniqueness abound.

The acting is, as you would expect, as good as can be. Masumi Miyazaki is amazingly diverse with her ever-changing roles and conveys a wide range of emotions. Issei Ishida, although quiet in the beginning, does great when required and actually makes his role look convincing. The direction has a big part in this though, which is solid as expected to be.

The cinematography is amazing, and done by Sono himself this time. Each shot, each scene is carefully put together and creates the ambiance for each shot comes off differently. The soundtrack is mostly composed of carnival music which just adds to the creepiness (or perhaps it’s only I who finds carnivals creepy).

The biggest weakness of Strange Circus, however, comes from the fact that as eternally confusing the movie is through the first hour, it is all explained much too thoroughly by the end. Unlike Suicide Circle, every loose end is tied, every question is answered and every problem solved, and that was a bit of a turn off for me. I don’t want everything spoon-fed to me, I want to think by myself and take my own conclusion to the movie. The worst part is, is that it’s done in the least subtlest of ways, so that lowered my overall impression of the film.

In a nutshell, Strange Circus is as strange and peculiar as could be, as creepy as possible, as mind-blowing as asked, as surreal as never believed, and as infinitely unexpected as Sono always is. Challenging to watch, horrible to bear and art in its truest form.

Overall grade: A