Dream-logic stuff happens, shot in a dreamy way by resurgent Suzuki (his big comeback, according to people who didn’t see A Tale of Sorrow). Story of the titular sound recording where the composer’s voice can be heard on the recording is true, the characters sharing this story are a German professor, a guy named Nakasago who is maybe his colleague or maybe a random maniac he met on a beach, and the girl (a geisha in mourning and her various doppelgangers). Between them, the three lead actors have been in all the weird Japanese movies: the prof in Funeral Parade of Roses, the girl in The Human Bullet, and Naka in Farewell to the Ark, Izo, and Nightmare Detective, not to mention the rest of Suzuki’s trilogy.
Sean Rogers in Cinema Scope:
A blood-red crab superimposed on a dead woman’s crotch, a bowl of pork fat grotesquely overfilled, a tongue erotically licking an eyeball in close-up, a man buried to the neck below riotously flourishing cherry blossoms — these visual flourishes originate entirely with the filmmaker, rather than the lean and fragmented short stories by the Taisho-era modernist Uchida Hyakken that serve as the film’s source material … Suzuki and screenwriter Tanaka Yozo, who scripted all the films of the trilogy, delight in setting up mysteries that are never resolved: Did Nakasago murder the woman on the beach? Did he seduce Aochi’s wife? Did Aochi himself sleep with Sono, or was she a ghost? And can Nakasago reclaim his daughter from O-Ine, even from beyond the grave?
