Bizarre is too general a term to describe this movie and surreal horror seems a bit ordinary by today's standards but, bizarre, surreal horror it certainly is. Talk of similarities with The Collector are unhelpful as this goes way beyond anything in the John Fowles novel or the subsequent film. Here the kidnap is carried out by a blind sculptor with the help of his mother so that he might have a model to work with (the suggestion here is that nobody would willingly work with a person with any disability). His studio is decorated with extremely strange and disconcerting sculpted body parts, legs, noses, mouths and of course breasts and almost all the action takes place among these artefacts. At first odd and then disquieting before becoming rather violent and eventually much more so, this is not a film for the casual viewer. There is much discussion of the sense of touch and the 'advantages' of blindness before this topples headlong into much darker territory. A cast of just three and Mako Midori plays the young girl to perfection. Never simply a captive she becomes the central character as this goes to where you really don't wish it to. Only in Japan, as they say and it certainly applies to this unique and very dark gem.
Review of Blind Beast
