MPD Psycho (2000)

 

Director: Takashi Miike

Screenplay: Eiji Ohtsuka, Gichi Ootsuka and Yumi Sirakura

Based on the manga by Eiji Ohtsuka

Cast: Ren Ôsugi as Tooru Sasayama, Naoki Hosaka as Kazuhiko Amamiya, Tomoko Nakajima as Machi Isono, Sadaharu Shiota as Masaki Manabe, Yoshinari Anan as Kikuo Toguchi, Rieko Miura as Honda, Lily as Yôko Yamamoto, Nae as Tomoyo Tanabe

A Night of the Thousand Horror (Shows) #39 / An Abstract Candidate

 

Reflecting on how I got into Takashi Miike as a director, I can think of a couple of titles in his filmography which helped shape the interest. Ichi the Killer (2001) - a very transgressive yet smart film, with greater layers than its infamy suggests. Rainy Dog (1997) - his sombre, compelling crime dramas, shot in Taiwan, arguably his best film or a strong contender for one. One I realise left a lasting mark early in getting into his career, and sadly in danger of being forgotten and unpreserved, is his 2000 mini-series based on a manga by Eiji Ohtsuka, who co-penned the series' script. From when Miike became big and notorious, and early DVD labels grabbed what they could of his career, this was a great example back then for me in showing Miike's workaholic mentality, constructing interesting productions in any medium.

It also, with fresh eyes, emphasises that despite his self professed "working director" viewpoint, that he works with others' material, he is an auteur. Truthfully, returning to MPD Psycho, its plot eventually becomes the weakest point, a strange mishmash from its manga source. It starts strangely but with a clear, intriguing beginning. Kazuhiko Amamiya (Naoki Hosaka) is a former police officer with split personalities. The show is not PC nowadays on this, confusing schizophrenia with multiple personality disorder, and sadly does not use this as much for Amamiya's character as it should; nonetheless he is someone with multiple personalities, one buried after the tragic murder of his wife. He killed the suspect as a cop, leading to a cover-up, and another personality to take over. That calm personality returns to the police as an outside help, for police detective Tooru Sasayama (Ren Ôsugi), when a series of perverse murders are taking place where, emphasising the manga's grotesque creativity, bodies are being buried with flowers growing out of their exposed brains.

The plot gets stranger, but stays the right side of compelling for the first half. The manga should be viewed as an entirely different work as, in the bit I have viewed, even from its first two volumes it is radically different in tone and content from this. The mini-series has that, stemming from an American hippy terrorist and musician Lucy Monostone, a sentient personality named Nishizono exists can transfer himself from host to host, invoking their homicidal side as he occupies them, another female sentient personality, able to also transfer through the web and phones, trying to stop him as Tooru and Amamiya with a female psychologist, effectively Amamiya's new boss and handler, have to deal with a variety of bizarre cases from school shootings based around brainwashed students to bingo games using severed body parts. The hosts Nishizono can occupy all have bar codes marked under one eye under the bottom eyelid, and he is directly connected to Amamiya and the murder of his first wife, alongside the kidnapping of his newest wife, all of which for the first three episodes, fifty plus minutes long to an hour, is compelling. The show does waver when it gets the final, with a convoluted exposition of artificially made personalities, to create killers, for a government project and trying to tie everyone together into the conspiracy. I do still love MDP Psycho, but I will admit the plot is ridiculous, more so when a huge exposition dump transpires near the end of the fifth episode, in a burning hospital, lasting long after the flames should have surely caused everyone to flee early in the exposition.

Where the show is still compelling is that, as a shot on digital production, Miike adds so much just as the director to this show in tone, improvising greatly. Even in the fifth episode, it ends abruptly with Tooru over the end credits, as a character who is with multiple women, wandering home to a miserable place with one of his romantic interests and her child, all slow burn tension as he tries to get a bath off-screen, broken by a moment of humour between the characters. The sense the mini-series has allowed Miike to improvise is felt throughout. The show, whilst the eventual need to explain everything does undercut it slightly, is idiosyncratic, and considering this is the director of the likes of Gozu (2005) and Visitor Q (2001), to say this is strange even for him at times tonally is a real crown of this show's virtues, more so as it is under seen. Miike was allowed to improvise around the narrative, without letting a low budget undercut him. The fact that I have always found the use of ordinary, grounded locations in Japan, in the streets and public places, evocative helps, but there are many of the flourishes, his impulsive, where Miike got his reputation for being unconventional but clearly showed his voice too. Little details stuck with me from the first time watching this mini-series and still do, such as there being green rain on beaches full of thrown away electronics, for example, with Miike one person whose use cheap and very obvious CGI always worked. Throughout, even using very creative placement of actors and props in scenes, this has the type of flourish outside of scripts that show the director's own creativity.

This goes as much in how, as a director with traits, his reoccurring actors are as much part of his style. Ren Ôsugi is the main reoccurring actor here, the stand out as the police detective and the one true friend of Amamiya, both as someone as talented to be able to be funny when need be for the comedy, but also to be serious when the narrative drama has to, a huge virtue as for the rest of his reoccurring actors in other films from the time for Miike. And when this gets wacky, Ôsugi gets a lot, an eccentric police chief who, when talking to his superiors about the latest murder case of strange spree killings, he will eventually have ones making comedic puns, with a Christmas tree in the background, and even playing a guitar. With his police assistant Tatsuya (Satoshi Matsuda), an otaku who, rather than presides over autopsies or real crime photos, creates intricate plastic figurines of the bizarre murders, and MPD Psycho does manage to slot itself as unique in the director's career, continuing his trend of idiosyncratic characters and an ability, without undercutting the drama, of having wacky humour that actually makes the characters distinct. Allowed to have tangents, Miike is allowed to breath, more so with a longer length of narrative to work with.

A huge virtue is that, even as a low budget production which embraces its style, but there is a lot of quality among those who are working with the director. The female personality is depicted in black 'n' white animation, a big aesthetic flourish among many that emphasis, even on low budgets, Takashi Miike is someone happy to embrace different aesthetic styles, such a stop motion in The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001), or his embracing on CGI regardless of how fake it looks. The music in particular for MPD Psycho by Tsugutoshi Goto and Yumi Shirakura, when it stands out, is striking. The main theme based as Lucy Monostone's, the death fixated Strange New World, is legitimate psychedelic rock which is haunting and strangely calm alongside the show's flourishes of audio aesthetic design. Considering this is a show that even defies how an episode should be structured, such as ending one after the end credits with an older woman calmly eating food in a cell, having the chance to direct a mini-series does show Miike alongside everyone working with him here, on or off-screen, are happy to take risks in terms of how this show presents itself.

The original world, as transported to this show, was already a distinct one to work with. Even if the plot has to try to wrap a lot up, it offers something intriguing connected to this format. The grotesqueness before, contrasted by the original manga's exceptional art style by Shou Tajima, elegant in appearance, is contrasted now by the surreality of early Miike when he worked with a lot of low budgets as a straight-to-video filmmaker who occasionally moved to theatrical films. One of the more contentious choices of the television mini-series, the censoring of gore by way of large blurred bars onscreen, is even deliberate, a weird touch to deliberately undercut how the narrative is perceived and not far from other times, whilst still being completely sincere, Miike has shown a trickster-like mentality to blur tone in his work or even undercut the mood of a film on purpose. Even in what the show looks like, it is helped that I have always found depictions of real Japanese locations, urban public sectors and on the street, compelling, always bustling or at least lived-in for many of these films rather than isolated in corridors.

It is also helped that, for the plot aspects which are absurd when revealed, of these personalities being the result of secret government experiments to have personalities that induce psychopathic behaviour just because, a lot is still startlingly relevant even if technology has evolved further from what this evokes. One major piece of exposition, a great example of pure colourful exposition than important, reveals the female personality is one of these experiments accidentally acquired off-line, a computer geek managing to update her better than a government in that, alongside being a benevolent personality also meant to be an artificial musical idol, she can enter any person through the internet and phones rather than the limitations Nishizono has, someone still able to enter people (and escape them) by modern technology. He even sneaks into a hospital at one point by way of floppy disc, and using anti-virus technology or just destroying a telephone tower have to be used to deal with the problem. Set at the time of the dying emperor, the end of the Showa era, this is still relevant in terms of how it plays with technology as much as it is a time piece in the best of ways, to the point that at one point a hospital staff member, a shut-in in a future life, is dragged into a war between these sides by way of his 2D girlfriend in a dating sim, when she is infected and develops an actual personality able to talk back to him. Even the hokeyness of the plot, more because it has to explain everything being rationally explained by technology, and having to make everyone related, has something salient as it evokes MK Ultra, a deeply troubling series of projects by the United States CIA in brainwashing and interrogating people, more so as this story stems from experiments by the United States in artificial personalities, but comes to Japan and its own history, including the left wing terrorist group the Japanese Red Army being evoked in the final episode.

MPD Psycho does still stand up even if the final narrative beats do go to directions it never should have needed. Only having some of the plot details being unnessary does not in the slightest undercut what virtues of here. In fact, it really emphasises that, whilst the narratives and drama in his work can be incredible, especially when he makes dramas, the virtues for Takashi Miike for me have come from when he has been allowed to match them with the creativity he shows onscreen. Returning to this mini-series, you have the perfect example to find in showing this virtue of his.

Abstract Spectrum: Bizarre/Grotesque/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium