Killer coif

>> Japanese horror flick Exte is an original and utterly creepy story about homicidal hair

by MALCOLM FRASER

Japanese director Sion Sono got his start as a poet and experimental filmmaker, later becoming renowned for extreme horror films such as Suicide Circle and Strange Circus. His latest, Exte: Hair Extensions, a prize-winner at last year’s Fantasia, is a comparatively mainstream work, but in the Japanese horror context, these things are relative.

The film begins in a customs storage yard, where policemen discover a crate containing a huge mass of human hair surrounding a girl’s body. At the morgue, cretinous night watchman Yamazaki (Ren Osugi) notices that the hair on the girl’s shaved head is starting to grow back; as it happens, he’s also a hair fetishist and black-market dealer in wigs and hair extensions. He sneaks the body out and keeps it at his house, farming the voluminous hair for his own profit, but the hair extensions he peddles develop a nasty habit of attacking and killing their owners.

In a parallel storyline, Yuko (Kill Bill’s Chiaki Kuriyama) is in training to become a hairstylist at a popular salon. She finds herself having to take care of her eight-year-old niece Mami (Miku Sato) when the girl flees her abusive mother (one-named actress Tsugumi). While a wave of hair killings sweeps the city, Kuriyama prepares for a make-or-break professional test, and we anxiously wait for the two plotlines to inevitably intersect.

The film is happily free of J-horror clichés, and although gruesome, it never devolves into an outright gorefest. Sono demonstrates a strong grasp of suspense and atmosphere, a gleefully perverse sense of humour, and a knack for the utterly creepy. (Stay far away from this film if you have any phobias surrounding hair—though if you didn’t before, you might develop some after seeing it). There are also great performances by the charming Kuriyama, the unsettling Osugi, and Tsugumi, whose performance is a spectacular feat of over-the-top villainy.

On the minus side, there are some plot points that don’t stand up to scrutiny (even within the film’s bizarre internal logic), and Sono doesn’t hesitate to shamelessly manipulate the viewer, especially with the pint-sized Sato. All the same, the film’s originality and energy make it well worth checking out for fans of extreme and cult cinema.

Exte: Hair Extensions opens
this Friday, May 23 at the
Cinéma du Parc

>> Movie Listings