Prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike`s horror musical The Happiness of The Katakuris is absurdist in the extreme. In fact it`s so bizarre I feel fairly certain in saying you would never have seen anything like it before. Billed as a cross between Shallow Grave and The Sound of Music, the film evokes many comparisons and is an amalgamation of homages and references to great cinema.

The film opens with a young woman eating breakfast in a hotel restaurant when she extracts a winged demon with boggle eyes from her soup. Quickly metamorphosing from conventional photography into clay animation as used by Jan Svankmajer, the sprite pulls out her tonsils and flies off into another universe before he eats them lovingly.

This mind-blowing sequence jettisons into a seemingly saner scenario, that of the Katakuri family who have moved to the mountains to run a small guest house. But no guests arrive until a strange man turns up who is dead by the morning. Fearing bad publicity the family agree to bury him in a nearby wood, frequently bursting into song during the event.

The Katakuris is a huge departure from Miike`s most recent films Audition and Dead or Alive, but the darkness remains, albeit in a much more humorous form. The Bollywood-esque dance routines and the sing-a-longa karaoke style songs accompanying one dead house guest after another make for a hilariously uneasy two hours. There may be a method to Miike`s madness, but it`s hard to fathom and there`s probably no need to bother. This schizophrenic recipe of different genres comes highly recommended and will give Hollywood a run for its money when they try to remake it.


Released 16 May