Izo: Takashi Miike's History Lesson

Izo is thus a deliberately complex film needing close attention rather than instant dismissal. The film necessitates a knowledge of how it uses it cultural and historical conventions. But, like any challenging work, Izo can be analyzed and understood within the context of international cinematic conventions. Miike restructures the violent codes of samurai, supernatural, and yakuza genres to reveal them as manipulative forces within Japanese culture. Izo contains deliberately excessive violations of geographical, historical, spatial, and temporal conventions. They exist to challenge the audience in a manner akin to the cinematic experiments of Jean-Luc Godard in the late 1960s but never in a deliberately obscurantist manner.