Let me start off by saying the ONLY reason I gave this movie a 2, is because I found myself laughing at a couple of the parts. People over examine this movie and act like its some hidden gem, but from the very start of the movie until the end it's exactly the same. Confusing Japanese incest/comedy. Literally the very beginning. Biggest let down in a while. I found myself checking the time constantly while waiting for it to end. And then not to mention the end. Hidden message? Deep meaning? Once again, I think it's just incest porn. But I have to admit, at the few parts I was laughing, I was laughing hard. SPOILER : For instance, the dad is having sex with a dead body and he says "you're wet. Even in death the body can get wet! How amazing!" And then he realizes she is releasing her bowels and just s**t all over him. He then says "this isn't amazing! It's s**t!" And I was dying.

A lot of people joke about Visitor Q being a family film and being a good film to watch with your whole family, but the funny thing is that I really did watch this film with my whole family! Mum, Dad, sister and even dog sat down to watch this with me and we all made it through to the end. We all had very different reactions. My Dad called it something along the lines of "sick crap" and wondered why I would buy this sort of thing. My Mum was more understanding, but thought it was just a film to shock its audience. My sister was just plain confused, and I'm pretty sure my dog fell asleep! Visitor Q is not a film for everyone. You either 'get' this sort of thing or you don't. I think Visitor Q is the type of film you can't really judge until you know what it was trying to say. It's very easy to say "this is just a mindless, sick piece of work. Chuck it on the bonfire!" but knowing Takeshi Miike, like I sort of do, Visitor Q has much more to say beneath its disturbing and perplexing surface.The film opens with one of the most disturbing scenes in the whole film. It's an explicit (but blurred) sex scene between a father and his daughter. The scene feels like it's going on forever and it's extremely uncomfortable to watch. Thankfully it's not entirely clear at first that the two are related (I thought it was a man and a prostitute by the way they were communicating) until there's mentioning of her Mum and her allowance. It sets the tone for the film.Visitor Q feels like a series of increasingly effed up events within a strange and thoroughly dysfunctional family. Miike addresses every taboo in the book and it's not an easy watch. Some of the more alarming taboos are played for laughs though, which makes it a little easier to watch, but it just comes across as plain weird! Visitor Q is a seriously deranged film and just about matches Gozu in terms of absurdity. I'm still not entirely sure in what it all means, but some have pointed to the visitor as being the viewer, which is an interesting take.The film looks extremely low budget. It has been given an alarming sense of realism thanks to the documentary style in which it has been shot. It looks grainy and cheap, but it suits the film well. It's devoid of the Hollywood gloss we constantly see in mainstream films, which makes everything seem all the more disturbing. Visitor Q is extremely slow to begin with and is even a little boring sometimes, which is a shame. Thankfully though there are some funny moments to keep you going and the final half hour is pretty much non-stop footage of disturbing behaviour.I don't really know if I liked it or not, but it's certainly something I'll never forget. I was hoping for something more because people always rave about it, but is that just because it dares to break so many taboos in 80 minutes? Visitor Q is a film for people with open minds and those people who only watch Hollywood movies should stay well clear of this. It's sometimes tedious, but always disquieting. I would've liked more character development around the family because they really are an interesting lot. I wouldn't recommend watching it with your family though like I did. It does get a little awkward!

If you read some reviews of this film that mentioned scenes involving a horny, faithless husband, a miraculously-lactating housewife, an abusive teenage son, and a despicable whore of a daughter...you might think "wow, that movies sounds so crazy and messed up that I HAVE to check it out! Anyone who doesn't like it probably just had their delicate sensibilities offended." Some reviewers imply "if you don't GET it, you just are too narrow- minded to appreciate Japanese cinema and culture." They seem to think it's a dark comedy. I think perhaps at some point the actors thought they were making a dark comedy. But there is nothing to GET about this movie, and nothing to laugh about.It is only by watching how the "story" unfolds in the film that you can really experience the creeping revulsion that the film brings on. It opens with a Japanese businessman in a "love hotel" with a girl half his age who is trying to seduce him into paying for sex with her. This is shot on hand-held video, which may have been edgy at the time, but doesn't matter now. This scene could be erotic or possibly funny until you realize that the girl is actually the man's daughter, and not an estranged one or anything. Now I've lived in Tokyo and this is all the more disturbing to me because a lot of young girls do sleep with men old enough to be their fathers for money, and a lot of men do barely know their daughters. But I hope and pray no one actually pays them for sex.Much less that the daughter then complains the father finished too soon and wants to charge him more. He doesn't have enough cash, so says he'll give the rest to her mother later.If you are reading this and think it sounds like a hysterical, incredibly black comedy, I assure you that the film is edited and scored in a very sparse, gritty way so that there are no comedic tones to it. It is extremity for extremity's sake, a hallmark of Miike's films.From there, the film gets worse. You watch as a teenage son routinely beats his mother while no one in the family bothers to look up from dinner. The mother is unloved by her husband too, and so goes into town to sleep with men for money to buy heroin. Apparently though, none of these things are really her trouble. Her trouble is some kind of metaphysical manifestation of her inability to be a mother, which a stranger takes care of by squeezing her breasts so hard that she reverts to post-natal lactating. Thereafter, this is all she cares about, and wants to squeeze out milk all over the floor or wherever she happens to be. Trust me, this is neither funny nor erotic.The husband, meanwhile, has found that his son is being bullied by neighbor kids, which explains the apparently nightly bottle-rocket assault on their house, which no one bothers to fix. This entire plot line is really stupid and twisted. Bullying is actual a very topical problem in Japan recently, but it is fairly pedestrian bullying of teasing and exclusion from groups, as opposed to the beating, home attacks, and urinating on the son that they show in this movie. Even one event like this in Japan would make national news, yet the parents don't care or acknowledge its strangeness in any way in the film. The father doesn't care about his son at all, instead thinking to film his abuse and use it as a news story for his job as a reporter. When he shows this idea to his female boss (HA! I'd love to see that in Japan.) she detests him. He resents this rejection, so he decides to rape her by the side of the road and accidentally/on purpose chokes her to death. So he hauls her corpse home to rape. But he gets stuck raping her, physically. So his wife comes to help him pry himself loose, with all the emotion of helping someone out of a jacket. Should I go on?Again, perhaps you're thinking this sounds so over-the-top that it must be funny. Again, I assure you that it is presented in a way that is filmed like a drama. It is not remotely funny. I will not judge the fans of the film who laughed at bits like killing a woman and raping her corpse, but I have to wonder what it is that they found amusing about it?There is an attempt to thread these characters together with a kind of metaphysical angel who subtly helps them to come together as a family again. A family that has sex with everyone and anything and doesn't demonstrate any human feelings for anyone. It doesn't work at all.To me, this is the director throwing as many taboos into one story as he could think of, and thinking that shock had value. The actors, looking for fame and trusting an established director, just went for it. And moviegoers were fooled into thinking they were seeing something edgy. Instead, it's a desperate attempt to be creative and relevant just by doing something that no one else would do. Because they know better.

Visitor Q opens with the title card "Have you ever done it with your Dad?" Through a digital camcorder, we watch a hot young prostitute as she seduces her father into having sex with her. Her father is the one with the camera, filming the scene for a documentary on Japanese youths. Eventually it seems the father is letting himself be seduced, and she tells him the price. They have sex, the father is a preemie, and the disappointed daughter reacts by doubling the price. The father then realizes the camera has been on throughout.Then another title card appears: "Have you ever been hit on the head?" What follows is a single shot, the content of which one could reasonably guess based on the title of the scene.Among all the connecting vignettes, twisted and vomit-provoking as can be, there is one which very telling, but by this time, the viewer is so taken aback that finding significance in what one is seeing seems so bewildering. But the scene involves the father in one of his many frantic situations with his camera, running off to the camera about how he is supposed to feel. He doesn't know how. And neither do we.Miike is known for his go-for-broke gross-out violence, blood, guts and gore, not to mention all the perverse sexuality we tend to see in his countless films, and many of them he has churned out as simply as just a fun job. When asked why, for instance, in Dead or Alive, a character produces a bazooka from thin air, Miike laughed and said "Why shouldn't he have a bazooka? Don't all guys fantasize about bazookas?" With this direct-to-video shocker, the viewer realizes how aware he is of the effect of his content, and in so being, never indicates to us what we are supposed to feel. Most movies, most TV shows, certainly the news and most other forms of media output indicate through a basic film language what we are morally supposed to be feeling. Miike doesn't find this social phenomenon so easily done, and builds this $60,000 cult film around those aforementioned forms of media, exploiting the production's conception as an exercise in exploring the benefits of low-cost Digital Video to replicate documentary footage and home movies, which lathers the film with a sense of realism, which contrasts wildly with the freakishly bizarre scenes and pitch-black humor. He keeps this tense juxtaposition consistent and never allows us for a moment to sit back and relax, to shift into auto-pilot.As a result, watching Visitor Q becomes this grotesque experience throughout which we realize how unaccustomed we are to human perversions. Am I repulsed, exasperated, laughing, compassionate, overwrought and bewildered? I am never signaled. You're on your own. And consequently, I felt all of those things.