Like Takashi Miike, Sion Sono is a prolific Japanese director known for his eclectic style and willingness to shock audiences with dark material, who found recognition outside of his home country with the 2001 cult horror film Suicide Club. Sono has directed his fair share of batsh*t crazy movies but Strange Circus, with its recurring imagery of incestual rape and Grand Guignol style excesses, is perhaps his most uncompromisingly odd. After witnessing her parents having sex, 12-year-old Mitsuko is raped by her father, initiating a cycle of ongoing abuse in the family. But is this reality, or the content of the latest work from a writer of erotic novels? A film featuring a paedophile schoolteacher forcing his daughter into a cello case and watch on while he has sex might sound like something approaching the level of depravity of A Serbian Film, but Sono's direction is surprisingly nuanced - this isn't just perverted titillation for the sake of controversy but ultimately a surprisingly mature film which deals effectively with a sensitive subject.
