good back-story, and good acting

Absolutely Fantastic

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

This film reminds me most of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1998. Strange Circus has about as much cohesion and steady reference to a time-line.The whole of the film seems to be the musings and ravings of a successful author who is also certifiably nuts.During the film, the author fills in her story, or what she wants to present as her story. The back story is thrown at the viewer in broken pieces, rather like the piles of junk present in so many rooms recurrently visited.The mythology starts around when the protagonist, Mitsuko, is twelve. She unintentionally sees her parents having sex. Then her father forces her to watch from inside a cello case. After several sessions of this, her father lets his wife know that Mitsuko has been watching. Then he forces the mother and the daughter to switch places. The mother grows to resent this; when the father is out, the mother abuses Mitsuko. Not much later, Mitsuko 'accidentally' pushes her mother down the stairs, resulting in the mother's death. Later Mitsuko attempts suicide and fails. The cello case follows her around in the movie as she continues life from a wheelchair.Those events are referred to again and again. The resulting length of time in a wheelchair seems a bit variable. Perhaps she's permanently there; perhaps not. As the film advances toward the end, the rate of scenario switching increases. Did the mother fall down the stairs, or was it the father? Was the child's suicide attempt just a part of the plot in a novel? Was the father the mastermind who triumphs at the end, or did the mother and daughter stump him (cut off all limbs) and chain him for additional sport?The subtitle of the film is 'Reality is the mystery,' and the film does a bang-up job of conveying that.----Scores----Cinematography: 7/10 Soft, grainy focus is all too common; the filters in the circus scenes are at least as detrimental. Add in a dash of jerky camera movement. To make things for interesting, the movie has scenes where walls are covered in blood (revolting and ugly), and rooms with very little furniture, but plenty of unorganized dross on the floors. This is ugly for the sake of ugly.Sound: 8/10 No particular problems.Acting: 7/10 Tough call. As with the actors in the films of Cronenberg (Existenz, Crash, Videodrome) or Lynch (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks), one has to figure the actors in Strange Circus are doing what the detail-oriented director wants. On the other hand, several performances seem wooden or amateurish.Screenplay: 8/10 Watching this film is like watching someone do a finger painting. The painting is done when the canvas is covered or the painter just quits. Also like a finger painting, one can gaze at it at length, trying to figure out what it means, even though no fixed meaning was intended.

What a strange movie. It reminds me of Chan-wook Park in the way that it teeters so close to the edges of bad taste, or the trite movie conventions of melodrama, in an effort to ultimately transform them into grand gestures. So that the lowly and visceral can be ennobled, humanized into something akin to an opera.The first half hour of this is superb stuff, or really close to it. The violated mind as a vaudeville stage, to which we are literally invited by the impresario holding out a hand at a first-person camera; once inside, the reality of vicious trauma involving pedophilia, incest, and a cello case, this perversity that we usually find in Miike reflected, thus reversed (a mirror is crucial in this segment, and eventually fractured), into a nightmare world of the mind rendered with images of Cronenberg and rooms painted bloodred. This part is great because it understands the stuff of nightmares, and how the mind is a funhouse mirror that distorts the violence heaped upon it.Then the movie becomes something like an inverse Audition, about an unstable woman with a cello case full of dark secrets weaving her web and about another web being woven by her prey meant to ensnare her. She is an author writing a novel about the childhood stuff we just witnessed in the first part. The most interesting notion here is that her victim sets out to find out about her and why she writes herself in her books, what kind of self hides behind the facade.All this is marred by a pretty juvenile finale, where we are tossed about through a bunch of shocking revelations from one reality to the other, in an effort to know what 'actually' happened. Here lies the problem for me; we are told too much, too much of what was earlier a suggestion is attempted to be explained away (we even experience an earlier scene in the way that it actually happened, this tacky Fight Club device) and too much of this hinges on some unexpected twist than something that crawls underneath.Interesting movie and I will keep from it the amazing shots of the damaged mind envisioned as a neon-lit luna park, but it only reminds me again of how important it is that we have David Lynch.Having achieved the fame and exposure that he has, surprising in itself, it is perhaps easy to leave him behind in lieu of more obscure, undiscovered works such as this. But none of these can sustain and sublimate like he knows the dreamy illusion within movie structures that remain vague, mere outlines that hint at spiritual perils. He knows the stuff of nightmares but more importantly what mechanisms control them in the mind, how illusions are formed. This one has some intuitive grasp, but grasps blindly.

The movie is weird, insane, controversial, challenging and as the title itself says, strange. I was preparing my brain to watch this because after reading the reviews, I knew I'm up for a good psychological thriller. And yes, to anyone who hasn't seen this yet, you should set your mind that you'll be watching a masterpiece. This will set your bars higher for psychological thriller movies. You need to focus and go beyond the erotic scenes if only to find out that this movie is well-crafted, well-thought, and well-directed one. This branch of movie-making(what they refer to as ero-gro) has kinda grown on me. Perfected by a montage of scenes and a puzzle of events integrated for a quest to bind the movie to a whole, make sure you don't miss a scene. The movie features a play of scene-shifting..luring and confusing the viewers which is a plus for those who have short attention span. From a sex scene you are then transported to a circus ride, cut to a girl who becomes her mother, to a picture of a lifeless naked woman, to a bunch of circus performers, and I could go on and on. This movie is an extremist one. It will show the sex scenes leaving nothing to imagination, steeled by realistic moans and very accurate portrayal by the actors. If the story can't keep you up, the amount of sex will. It will also show extreme levels of no-holds-barred morbidity, goriness and insanity. It also depicts extreme levels of themes only a masterpiece could feature. Actually, I found the movie creepy. No there are no white ghosts or jump scares on this one, but creepy in a way that you would start questioning the sanity of the director. He's not human. Gathering the viewers' attention through a sequence of events that could possibly be the worst thing that could happen to a family, the movie caters to viewers of every genre, of any age. What I actually find appalling is having a minor(the girl who played young Mitsuko) play the part of having to witness and digest such morbid scenes. Isn't that disturbing to begin with? The premise of the film as a psycho-thriller is to bring out the inquisitive, theoretical selves of the watchers. You start questioning why did such scene happen? Why did such character say those lines? Which one was the dream? Which one was reality? What's the bigger picture? Who's who? Who's THE ultimate character? This movie is a challenge. And the ending steeled it. The movie possesses the basic protocols of good movie-making; that is, a good beginning to introduce the conflict and hold the viewers' attention, a climax which highlights the main conflict/s and leaving a handful of questions to our minds, and a surreal ending that will answer these questions(not to mention leave us dumbfounded). I can't even write a synopsis of the movie. Just thinking of writing it seems very exhaustive. I can't put into words the details of the movie. That's how complicated and well-developed the story is. Story-telling won't do. The themes of the movie are also as disturbing as the scenes itself. Incest is the most noticeable theme of the movie. But the inclusion of other minimal themes (but still disturbing as they are) such as dismemberment, revenge, self-denial and what appears to be schizophrenic characters all add to the complexity of the movie. Hell even the soundtrack was creepily weird. What brought this movie to its high level though was the acting. Its like everything just fell into place. A deep story and stellar acting from the cast(especially Masumi Miyazaki who perfectly played 3 personas), this movie is undeniably a masterpiece. 10/10.

This is the first of its kind (I'm sure there are more like this movie out there) that I've seen, so I don't consider my vote fair. During the movie, I had mixed feelings of: this is disgusting, this is a masterpiece, this is amazing, this is horrendous. Right after watching the movie, I definitely thought, "What did I just spend my 2 hours watching?"However, I believe this is an amazing film. Even though it's disturbing, the story is great, the film is excellently shot - the film IS motivated to tell that story, however weird it may be.I recommend this movie, especially if you're looking for something new, something to think about; if you're studying film or if you're just bored. :)My last comment is: I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, and I recommend it to others.