Blind Beast (1969)

Once and a while a film comes along that really pushes the envelope on the emotional landscape that modern life has become accustomed to. Blind Beast, or Môjû, fits into this category with ease. Yasuzo Masumura’s dark tale is something of a screwed up spectacle as the audience is dragged along a story of love, betrayal, and what some would consider, insanity, which leads to each of the character’s downward spirals.

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A blind sculptor, Michio (Eiji Funakoshi), manages to kidnap a beautiful, young model, Aki (Mako Midori), and brings her back to a massive warehouse that he has turned into his home. There, where he lives with his caring mother (known simply as Mother in the film), he spends his time creating massive sculptures dedicated to different body parts. Each body part represents a specific sense and he creates these pieces with incredible precision. Michio wants nothing more than to create a sculpture of Aki, but to do so, he needs to feel every curve of her body. Aki tries to escape over and over, each time unsuccessfully. That is, until finds a possible weak link: his mother. She tries to turn mother against son, and in doing so she discovers that she has developed a sick, twisted love of Michio and her ever-growing obsession with him, may be beyond anything the sculptor had for his subject.

The story of Blind Beast is definitely not one of the happier ones to come along in film. As I’ve wandered through several reviews regarding this film, one description kept popping up, and that was psychosexual. I cannot think of a simpler way to put the complex film into a short description. Yes, there’s much more beneath the surface, and the film’s chalk-full of hidden meanings and deeper thoughts, but on the surface psychosexual fits Blind Beast rather well. That’s not to say that there’s TONS of sex and blood, in fact there’s almost none, but there’s something within the film that’s more disturbing then any amount of gore could ever create. It may be the atmosphere, the enclosed single space where the characters spend over three quarters of the film, or just the descent within each character’s mind, but whatever it was, it was strong enough to leave a lasting impression (something many films fail to do).

The camerawork and set design for Blind Beast is fantastic. Every shot is beautiful, and creates a sense of dread that unfolds from every dark space on the screen. The camera allows the set itself to come alive, following Michio and Aki as they go back and forth inside their heads. One of the scenes that really stuck out, for me, was when Aki first awakens in the warehouse. As she comes to she realizes that she’s no longer at home, and Michio is trying to explain why she’s there. As she stumbles in the darkness, moving away from the blind sculptor she continuously runs into various sculptures of human body parts (in various sizes), and Michio never slows his movements as he follows the sounds she makes throughout the warehouse. That is, until the lights come on, and for the first time the entire room is in focus. All of the body parts hang on the walls and two giant nude sculpted bodies form a maze on the floor. At that moment, if you haven’t before, you truly understand that Michio is not just another sculptor, and that things may not be looking to good for Aki.

This brings us to our cast. Eiji Funakoshi does an incredible job playing the blind sculptor. He brings a certain desperation that is necessary to have any sort of sympathy for a man who’s responsible for kidnapping a girl. On the flip side, Mako Midori was wonderfully entertaining as the poor soul that finds herself kidnapped, and eventually has her sanity slip out from underneath her as her feelings for Michio overcome her fear of being trapped in the warehouse.  Her descent into madness is one of the most difficult character arcs to watch that I’ve seen in a long time. If anything stays with you, besides the sick and twisted scenery, it would be her character as she abandons all hope and accepts her fate. The broken love between these two is truly heart wrenching. On a side note, special mention goes to Noriko Sengoku (the mother character) who is excellent as a caring parent completely blinded by her love for her son.

Blind Beast is a completely different kind of film than most mainstream viewers would expect. It moves at a tremendously slow pace, but never really loses any steam. As the film progresses the tension mounts, until the third act kicks in. It’s here, really, that Blind Beast packs its biggest wallop on the audience’s senses. Blind Beast is a film that will stay with you long after the credits have rolled.