Gakuryu Ishii may not be well-known in the West, but his aesthetics and work ethic have seen him become regarded as one of the most pre-eminent punk rock directors in the world (not that this is a long list). The former Sogo Ishii (he changed his name), launched into the world with the feverish cyberpunk of Crazy Thunder Road (1980), and Burst City (1982), which segue into his “‘90s vibes era” with a personal favourite of mine, Angel Dust (1994), and August in the Water (1995), after which he went on to make Isn’t Anyone Alive?(2012), Punk Samurai (2018), Electric Dragon 80,000v (2001), and That’s It! (2015) – a run where no two things are alike. What I’m taking a long way around to say is that no box can hold Gakuryu Ishii, which is ironic when I’m building up to his new movie, The Box Man (touring the UK in select cinemas nationwide). A pertinent question though, for any new Ishii movie is which version of the enigmatic Japanese director are we getting?
In terms of pinpointing what style of movie this is, The Box Man was conceived in the 1990s as Ishii had, for the last few decades, wanted to adapt the book by Kōbō Abe (best known for the Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another, which was adapted for the big screen by Hiroshi Teshigahara). I can only assume that Abe’s untimely death put the production in stasis for the foreseeable future, and emerging on the other side we have a movie that’s a weird ride, which for fans familiar with Abe’s work – like the fascinatingly titled play The Man Who Turned Into A Stick (1957) – will come as no surprise. For everyone else, The Box Man is literally about just that – a man (Masatoshi Nagase), who has cut himself out of society and looks on from afar whilst wearing a cardboard box on his head, and only in exorcising himself from the rules of the modern world has he become free. In Japan, people who wilfully transform into a hermit or experience this extreme form of social withdrawal are referred to as Hikikomori. However, he’s not as free as his heart desires as an equally eccentric group has their eyes set on him, namely a suicidal veteran doctor called General (Koichi Sato), a fake doctor in his employ (Tadanobu Asano), and their young, beautiful Ingénue/nurse, Yoko (Ayana Shiramoto). There’s also a familiar face in the first act – a monosyllabic homeless man armed with spears (indie mainstay Kiyohiko Shibukawa), and as odd as it sounds, people are after the head of The Box Man as any town can only have one, and as soon as you become fascinated by The Box Man, you become one.
To return to that opening question, which version of Gakuryu Ishii are we getting for The Box Man? Predictably, it’s like nothing he’s done before, and while that could be construed negatively, he’s known as a punk filmmaker and they don’t follow the rules or obey any expectations.
That unseen X factor elevates The Box Man into something I can’t stop thinking about, and in today’s age of over-stimulation that’s a very rare achievement
The movie opens with Nagase narrating his writings (in his pleasing baritone), from his notebook as he watches people obliviously get on with their lives. His peace is chaotically interrupted by Asano and Shibukawa, both of whom want to kill him – the latter armed with a sniper rifle and the other with traditional Japanese weaponry. After this Box Man became one, the movie jumps over to Asano’s cohort and shows the fascination people have with what’s ostensibly a homeless person living with a cardboard box on their head. During this phase of the movie, we have an erotic enema scene (it’s pretty grim), and a fight between two men who are both wearing boxes over their heads, with the victor becoming the true Box Man – and it’s as funny as it sounds. This leads the movie to its conclusion, with the movie diving into the labyrinths of life and existential angst that drives these people to such comically abstract extremes, and if you go into this movie expecting answers (easy or otherwise), you’ll leave disappointed as Ishii’s latest movie is entirely subtextual and open for interpretation. As such, many will actively dislike the ideological execution that puts it in sync with the experimentalists of 1960s America, Czech & Slovak New Wavers and the Japanese New Wave.
For those open to the ways of The Box Man, you’ll find a movie that interrogates the role of modern humanity and the spaces we inhabit, voyeurism, manic depressive episodes, and envy, with part of the movie being ecologically minded (Are our lives too big for the planet to accommodate? Do we all need to downscale?). The cast has to be credited for making something so ‘other’ feel aspirational and transcendent, with them all committing to meeting the material head-on as any stray part of this puzzle would destroy everything. The costume design is stellar, turning a cardboard box into something between a suit of armour and a desirable micro-home (complete with its very own dark room). There’s also a romance angle, with Yoko representing the light at the end of the tunnel for the three leads caught under the spell of The Box Man – which makes it sound like she has no agency, but in reality her role is a deeply empathic one. Beyond that, we have a propulsive jazz score like that of a classic Seijun Suzuki movie, and handsome cinematography by Hideho Urata that playfully strikes a balance between abstract, silly and thoughtful.
At the end of the day, it’s an odd movie, and one that I could’ve easily chastised or reductively accused of being pretentious, but whether it’s the end-of-the-world minimalism of Isn’t Anyone Alive? or the liminal, supernatural mystery of Angel Dust – there’s something intangible about Gakuryu Ishii’s work that gets under your skin. That unseen X factor elevates The Box Man into something I can’t stop thinking about, and in today’s age of over-stimulation that’s a very rare achievement. Its experimental nature isn’t that rarefied type showcased in art galleries, and the sensibilities here are mainstream at heart as they come from the absurdity of the characters’ lives. Structurally, The Box Man is no weirder than a Peter Strickland movie, but it’s more the Kafka-esque weirdness of In Fabric than the difficult chicanery of a Symbiopsychotaxiplasm. Of course, someone without the same reference points could watch it, walk out of the cinema and boldly declare it the worst movie they’ve ever seen, but all I’ll say is it’s a clear case of you get out what you put in.
Hang on … does that make me a Box Man now?
The Box Man is playing in Select Cinemas Nationwide (UK) from Tomorrow
