Wow! What a ride this movie is! Be warned, however. This movie is a ‘hack-and-slash’ gory romp of blood and guts. So, if this is not your thing, I suggest you do not watch it. Even though I generally dislike these types of movies, I loved this one because it is so Avante-Garde. Despite what you might imagine, while it is a gay-themed movie, there is no romance here, however. Certainly not a BL by any stretch of the imagination. It is just sensual.

This movie is based on a real lifestyle of gruesome theater that was popular in France in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century called Grand Guignol. While it was characterized by the ‘grotesque” drama, it stresses horror and sensationalism and explored the darker aspects of human attributes. This movie takes that to a whole new level, obviously.

The story unfolds on an island with a school teeming with a bunch of misfits boys. To say they are odd would be an understatement. All of them play their part just short of being caricatures, which then makes them masterful actors. They overplayed their parts but underplayed their significance, which allowed for some brilliant acting.

It starts out when a group of them are going to put on a Grand Guignol performance, but a new transfer student comes in and becomes a member of this troubadour. The teachers themselves are equally odd and the whole environment is macabre and dark and incredibly grisly. The physical environment not only feels isolated, the whole of the environment feels isolated and alone.

The movie starts out with its usual introduction of strange characters including the head chef, Mizukami (Masaki Nakao), who looks at the new student Itsuki (Rio Komiya) with sexual lust and also like a slap of meat to be eaten. He already is having a sordid and kinky sexual affair with one of the students, dressing him up like a schoolgirl. A new teacher is also introduced, Otomo (Hiroki Sasamori), who becomes pivotal to the ending of this twisted story.

However, reality and fantasy begin to blur, and we are treated to a bizarre series of gruesome murders, including the beheading of Misukami. It devolves into ritualistic sacrifice of skin peeling, and body mutilation, and disembowelment thrown in for good measure. Obviously, the line between reality and insanity is blurred and perhaps it is not even there. We are not sure if the story is real.

Purely from the level of acting, they are all outstanding. If I have to give a slight edge it would be to Rio Komiya as Itsuki because he made it to the end and because his level of reality went from normalcy to complete insanity to embracing the eroticism of the moment and enveloping the context he was in. Perhaps it was impossible to distinguish the pleasure from the pain and maybe there is none.

This is not an erotic movie, but it has erotic overtones. It has forthright kisses and rather kinky sex scenes coupled with a lot of blood and gore. The ending tried to be homoerotic but never got there, although the effort was certainly made.

The story is sheer madness with a heavy dose of surrealism. It is abstract at the same time grounded in a bizarre sense of reality. Even though it seems like it was a giant fantasy in the end, the whole of their reality just seemed like a play, being performed in a theater-in-the-round as well.

This is one of the finest acted movies I have seen in a long time, particularly by some young actors. They had to take a story that made no sense, make sense of it, and tell it bizarrely (in a cryptic fashion) and make to believable for us. They succeeded. I know many of you will not like or even enjoy this movie but see the kind of style of theater it is presenting and the effort they made to be true to form to it and maybe you might appreciate its beauty.

I did.

Rating- 4.5 out of 5

Streaming on- Gagaoolala