Kotoko (2011)

August 18, 2023 10:24 AM

When a single mother suffers a nervous breakdown, she is suspected of child abuse and her child is taken away. Her mental suffering escalates as she succumbs to her darkest fantasies.

Starring Cocco, Shinya Tsukamoto, Yuko Nakamura, Eiichi Takahashi, Ryugo Nakamura.

Written, produced, directed, photographed, and edited by Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo The Iron Man
).

Average rating of 3.8 on Letterboxd.

Multiple streaming options. JustWatch.

Soliloquy was kind enough to support MeFi with a donation. Their second request was for six movies about Japanese films centered on people with disabilities. I'll be using the tag #DisabilityInJapan

Donate $25 or more to MeFi and you can MeMail me a request for a themed day of your own. I'll fill up the sidebar on FF with six movies that fit your theme.

posted by DirtyOldTown (4 comments total)

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posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:24 AM on August 18, 2023

It might seem a copout to include a bonkers horror film about mental illness in this list but a) I can't let them all be romantic dramas about blind women or action films about blind swordfighters (and I could easily have filled the list with either) and b) this is really quite good.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:26 AM on August 18, 2023

Saw this one as part of the big 10-film Tsukamoto box set that Arrow Video released a few years ago. I was totally blown away by how Tsukamoto used all of the tools he'd built up over the years of making his various avant-garde shock/suspense films to create this deeply empathetic portrait of someone in crisis. It's a harrowing watch but it stuck the landing IMO.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:27 AM on August 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

That Tsukamoto box set is a treasure, marred only by the non-inclusion of Gemini.
posted by remembrancer at 2:53 PM on August 18, 2023