Following a shocking incident witnessed by his boss and his men, Yakuza Ozaki (Sho Aikawa) has become a liability. His own subordinate, Minami, is assigned the task of driving Ozaki—who has lost his mind and suspects nothing—to a dumping ground in Nagoya, where they will “take care” of him. The problem is made simultaneously simpler and more complex when Ozaki suddenly dies en route. While searching for a phone to inform his superiors, Minami discovers that Ozaki’s body has disappeared from the back seat of the car. The hunt for his boss’s corpse turns into a deeply unsettling odyssey.
With Gozu, Takashi Miike created a striking work that has stood the test of time without fading.
Looking back at a striking work
Gozu stands out as a remarkable work due to its unique ability to subvert the codes of the traditional Yakuza film. Takashi Miike catches the viewer off guard by launching his narrative in a conventional criminal register before plunging it, with unprecedented audacity, into a waking nightmare and pure dream logic. By discarding all realism in favor of a surreal wandering where death itself loses its bearings, the Japanese filmmaker redefines the boundaries of genre cinema, proving that a feature film can completely break free from conventional storytelling to embrace creative chaos.
Beyond its fractured narrative structure, the film leaves a lasting impression through its masterful management of unease and the absurd, akin to a Freudian exploration under the influence. Miike composes a gallery of grotesque and disturbing characters—culminating in this enigmatic bull-headed figure—and orchestrates scenes of absolute strangeness that defy comprehension. This total freedom of tone, where the grotesque rubs shoulders with the most disturbing poetry, elevates the feature film into an unforgettable unidentified filmic object that continues to influence contemporary genre cinema by pushing visual and thematic experimentation to its absolute limits.
A Yakuza film?
Here, Miike uses the Yakuza to dive into his unconscious with stops at several of his obsessions. Between caricatured gangsters, psychosexual anomalies, disturbing incongruities, and nonchalant grotesqueries, Gozu takes place in filthy sets that suggest an apocalypse has occurred in general indifference. Carried by a succession of shady figures and aberrant misadventures, Takashi Miike’s film imposes itself as a true fever dream, irreducible to any rational interpretation.
The caricatural aspect makes these Yakuza sympathetic and, therefore, easy to grow attached to. Moreover, one almost forgets what they are, seeing them simply as thugs who cannot get a grip on things and end up getting lost in a world too complex for them. The main character is perfect in this role of antihero.
A work to watch again and again.
Gozu is screened at the Fantasia International Film Festival on August 2, 2026.
