Strange Circus

At the titular Strange Circus, a burlesque performance commences. The master of ceremonies brings out a guillotine and offers the audience a chance to be placed inside of it. He brings a young girl onstage and asks her if she fears death, but she responds that she has been destined to die from birth.

This sequence is then revealed to be a nightmare being had by twelve-year-old Mitsuko Ozawa. She awakens in a panic and enters her parents' bedroom seeking comfort, but discovers them having sex. Her father Gozo notices her and later locks her in a cello case, forcing her to witness him have sex with her mother, Sayuri. He then reveals Mitsuko to Sayuri and coerces Sayuri into the cello case, where she is forced to watch as Gozo rapes Mitsuko.

Following this incident, Sayuri becomes physically abusive towards Mitsuko. During one particularly violent altercation, Mitsuko fatally pushes Sayuri down a flight of stairs. In the wake of Sayuri's death, Mitsuko's sanity begins to decline, struggling to separate her identity from that of her mother. She ultimately attempts suicide by throwing herself off a cliff and survives the fall, but sustains injuries that require her to use a wheelchair.

This is all revealed to be a story written by reclusive, paraplegic novelist Taeko Mitsuzawa. Her assistant, Yûji, is suspicious of her, believing her paralysis to be a ruse and wondering about a red door in her apartment, which she forbids anyone to enter.

After completing her manuscript, Taeko admits to Yûji that she is in fact the "Mitsuko" character she constantly writes about, and that the novel is meant to be a retelling of Taeko's own abusive upbringing. When Yûji compares the feeling of being sexually abused to having all of one's limbs amputated, Taeko decides that she will turn Mitsuko in an amputee at the end of the novel; Yûji suggests she turn Gozo into an amputee as well, to which she agrees. In Taeko's red room, she inserts food through a peephole in a cello case. Yûji manages to distract her long enough to allow himself to sneak into the room, where he calls her and orders her to return to her childhood home. She returns to the room to find the cello case empty.

Taeko arrives at the house Mitsuko grew up in. Yûji appears and takes her upstairs, where they find a maimed, bloodied Gozo, still alive but bound in chains and missing all of his limbs. It is revealed that Taeko is actually an older Sayuri, and that Mitsuko was the one thrown down the stairs, though she survived and was subsequently rescued from her dysfunctional family and placed into foster care. Sayuri, unable to handle the guilt of being complicit in the abuse of her daughter, had repressed the memory and deluded herself into believing she was Mitsuko. She had also vengefully pushed Gozo down a flight of stairs after discovering his multitude of paramours, resulting in him becoming wheelchair-bound. After finishing her first novel, Sayuri adopted the moniker Taeko, stole Gozo's wheelchair, and stored him in the cello case.

Yûji then reveals himself to be an older Mitsuko, having had a sex change, and grabs a chainsaw to sever Taeko's limbs. Taeko awakens screaming next to Yûji and asks for her wheelchair, though he claims not to know what she is referring to. She finally stands up in front of him, but he insists that she was never paralyzed. She awakens again chained up in bed next to Gozo. Yûji stands over her with the chainsaw, laughing.

Back at the Strange Circus, the MC presents Sayuri with her head in the guillotine, then removes his mask to reveal himself as Gozo. Various other figures from Taeko's life are present, including her editor, his brothers, a teenaged Mitsuko, Gozo's lovers, a young Mitsuko, and Yûji, all of whom give her a standing ovation. Gozo wishes her well, and the guillotine drops.

• Masumi Miyazaki as Sayuri Ozawa / Taeko Mitsuzawa
• Issei Ishida as Yûji Tamiya
• Rie Kuwana as twelve-year-old Mitsuko Ozawa
• Seiko Iwaido as teenage Mitsuko Ozawa
• Fujiko
• Madame Regine
• Tomorowo Taguchi as Taeko's Editor
• Hiroshi Ohguchi as Gozo Ozawa

Russell Edwards of Variety wrote that the film "shocks, provokes but ultimately bores with its tasteless indulgences" and that it "will be most at home at midnight fest sidebars, or anywhere else where a trash aesthetic is embraced."^[1]

• Strange Circus at IMDb