Director Hisayasu Sato has the rind cracking again in one of his better movies, a brutally satiric expose of a morbidly dysfunctional Japanese family, highlighting a gross and perverted edge that hews closely with the format of many of his sex-themed melodramas. However gloomy and grim, GIMME SHELTER actually succeeds as a comedy, albeit one filled with too many moral border crossings to count.
There is not so much a plot than a series of horrific episodes showing the family's disintegration, apparently taking place over a manic 24 hours. As the movie opens, 17-year-old Kiriko is sitting with her parents at the kitchen table and is happy about her birthday cake while the parents drone on about her twin brother Eiki, who does not even want to leave his room on his birthday. Eiki spends most of the film in his darkened bedroom, looking at atomic bomb explosions and sending Morse code messages to unseen recipients. Kiriko's day at school is punctuated by an unpleasantly lengthy rooftop sex scene with her teacher, who despises her. Back at home, the mother performs strangely erotic-comic aerobics until the TV she is following literally explodes in response, after which she consumes food and milk in an increasingly outrageous segment. The son finally emerges from his room and, now completely insane, viciously rapes his mom and later assaults his sister (twice). The father, revealed as a homosexual stalker who harasses young men in public, at one point stands looking up, terrified and confused at the surrounding skyscrapers in one of Sato's signature moments symbolizing madness. There are also a few striking examples of Sato's guerilla film-making style, in which he records his actors improvising in public via a furiously on-the-move camera.
The cosmos of family perversions collected here is quite impressive in Sato's ruthless commentary on isolation and perversion within the family unit. GIMME SHELTER is an essential entry that registers a very personal retaliation against the much-vaunted reticence of the Japanese. The film's nihilistic feast is a logical extension of the style and approach of the 1990s "Cinema of Transgression," both cinematically and musically. Sato's camera successfully conveys the family's lunacy, confusion and separation via occasionally clever, arty compositions as the characters journey through depraved daily routines. Musically, this descent into psychosis is underscored by a range of funk and electronica. Additionally, almost all the scenes are set in the most claustrophobic settings imaginable, and even the outside world of the city is depicted as extremely oppressive. The ending is a predictably downbeat rumination on self-destruction and sexual excess.
