Dis­cov­er this sur­re­al Japan­ese erot­ic hor­ror about artis­tic obsession

“My name is Aki Shi­ma,” Aki (Mako Midori) says in voiceover at the begin­ning of Blind Beast. ​“I was nev­er very pop­u­lar as a fash­ion mod­el.” This nar­ra­tion is accom­pa­nied by black-and-white images of Aki tak­en by the pho­tog­ra­ph­er Mr Yamana for an exhi­bi­tion that ​“cre­at­ed quite a sen­sa­tion.” It is not hard to see why.

In these pho­tographs Aki is both nude and bound in chains, and in some her like­ness is mul­ti­plied, cre­at­ing a ​’60s psy­che­del­ic pop-art pas­tiche that expos­es her body while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly con­found­ing her iden­ti­ty and occlud­ing her inte­ri­or­i­ty. All this pre­fig­ures themes that will dom­i­nate the rest of the fea­ture, as anoth­er artist reduces Aki to mere flesh, sub­jects her to dif­fer­ent kinds of bondage, and ulti­mate­ly cuts her up into her con­stituent parts. Even the mono­chrome pre­sen­ta­tion of these pho­to­graph­ic stills, in a film that will oth­er­wise turn out to be shot in colour, sly­ly intro­duces the key theme of restrict­ed sensation.

Com­ing into the gallery ear­ly for a meet­ing, Aki spots a soli­tary man pass­ing his hands slow­ly over a sculp­ture of her naked body. She has the odd, synaes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence of feel­ing as though his hands are actu­al­ly on her. Lat­er, exhaust­ed from a long day’s mod­el­ling, she calls for a local masseur to come give her a sooth­ing back rub in her apart­ment (“I like it hard, ” she instructs him, ​“if it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t sat­is­fy me”), and as she realis­es that this blind man, Michio (Eiji Funakoshi), is the same per­son she had seen in the gallery, he chlo­ro­forms her, and with help from his moth­er (Nori­ka Sen­goku), moves Aki to his seclud­ed, pri­vate warehouse.

Aki wakes in dark­ness; it is a way of accli­ma­tis­ing her – and the view­er – to Michio’s world of blind­ness. Michio appears with a torch, clear­ly for Aki’s ben­e­fit rather than his own, and as she tries to evade him around this large stu­dio space, he illu­mi­nates the dif­fer­ent sec­tions of wall that she pass­es, dec­o­rat­ed with out­sized sculp­tures respec­tive­ly of eyes, noses, ears, lips, arms, legs and breasts, while in the room’s cen­tre are two gigan­tic full-body stat­ues, one supine, the oth­er prone.

Michio is an artist, his cho­sen form the female body. And this unworld­ly, some­what naïve momma’s boy intends for Aki to serve as the mod­el for his mas­ter­work, whether she likes it or not. The décor of Michio’s stu­dio – all dis­em­bod­ied parts – recalls the para­ble of the blind men and an ele­phant. Sight­less from birth, Michio, whose expe­ri­ence of the fem­i­nine is con­fined to his live-in moth­er, reduces women to their phys­i­cal form, decon­struct­ed into sep­a­rate appendages and blown up as pal­pa­ble dec­o­ra­tions to fuel his fan­tasies and desires.

Now that he has Aki in his clutch­es, Michio hopes to mould a syn­the­sised repli­ca of her, limb by limb, from a raw mass of clay, like Pyg­malion craft­ing his per­fect lover, before Aki shows him the greater appeal of a real, liv­ing, breath­ing woman. Michio and Aki’s rela­tion­ship con­stant­ly shifts from cap­tor and pris­on­er to cat and mouse to artist and muse to mur­der­er and accom­plice to per­verse, self-con­sum­ing lovers, in a nar­ra­tive mod­u­lat­ed to the para­dox­i­cal strains of Stock­holm syn­drome and BDSM.

Michio claims that his work with Aki will ​“cre­ate a total­ly new genre of art”. One sus­pects that this is an aspi­ra­tion which direc­tor Yasu­zo Masumu­ra shares. Hav­ing already explored sex and desire in films like Man­ji, Irezu­mi and The Red Angel, Masumu­ra turned to the ero guro nansen­su of Edo­gawa Rampo’s writ­ings for Blind Beast (in the same year that Masumura’s com­pa­tri­ot Teruo Ishii used Ram­po for his Hor­rors of Mal­formed Men). Work­ing from a Ram­po adap­ta­tion by his screen­writer Ishio Shi­rasa­ka, Masumu­ra strips sex and sex­u­al rela­tions back to their cor­po­re­al basics, while find­ing ways to express desire’s elu­sive­ness and exclusiveness.

“I want to pio­neer the art of touch­ing, where only the blind can appre­ci­ate it,” Michio tells Aki. ​“A new art­form by and for the blind.” Masumu­ra too fore­grounds tac­tile sen­sa­tions, via a medi­um which ordi­nar­i­ly priv­i­leges sight and sound, and pre­cludes actu­al touch. Masumura’s strat­e­gy for real­is­ing a hap­tic cin­e­ma are to have char­ac­ters con­stant­ly nar­rat­ing the expe­ri­ence of grop­ing, pal­pat­ing and prob­ing, or play­ing out their dra­mas on and around sculp­tures of bod­ies and body parts.

As Aki grad­u­al­ly los­es her own sight – along with her wish to escape – in this dark, her­met­ic envi­ron­ment, Masumu­ra intro­duces a tun­nel vision effect, plac­ing the lovers’ inti­mate embraces against a back­ground that becomes ever more shad­owy and unclear, so that prac­ti­cal­ly all we see is the close con­tact of flesh on flesh, removed from any broad­er con­text. The artist’s (and filmmaker’s) stu­dio becomes a myth­ic, psy­cho­log­i­cal space.

Antic­i­pat­ing the obses­sive, deviant amour fou of Nag­isa Oshima’s scan­dalous In the Realm of the Sens­es, Blind Beast is a reflex­ive film about art- (and love-) mak­ing. Its irra­tional sto­ry ends as it begins – with a woman dis­mem­bered and abridged to her sex­u­alised image, as both art and pieces of art, even as her nar­rat­ing voice remains to mark her as a flesh-and-blood indi­vid­ual and to remind us that all along she has been con­trol­ling this nar­ra­tive of her own captivity.

Aki is like the Venus de Milo, turned into an object of desire pre­cise­ly for hav­ing been carved up under the male gaze (or at least touch), and con­densed to an itemised list of rei­fied seg­ments. And yet she is more than the sum of her parts, and the film breathes new life into her even as she allows, even wills, her life to be tak­en away.

This con­tra­dic­tion lies at the heart of Masumura’s strange, sur­re­al film. ​“We women are con­ceit­ed,” Aki tells Michio, who real­ly does not under­stand women at all, ​“We need to dom­i­nate.” And so Aki does, impos­ing her own desire on a sto­ry osten­si­bly about Michio’s, and refus­ing to be some­body else’s vic­tim, play­thing or object. Ulti­mate­ly, this is a tale of Liebestod told very much on its heroine’s terms, and by the final scenes every­thing is pared down to its most abstract and ani­mal­is­tic. What remains is a sen­su­al, sen­sa­tion­al­ist work like noth­ing that has ever pre­vi­ous­ly been seen.

Blind Beast is avail­able on High-Def­i­n­i­tion Blu-ray via Arrow Home Video from 23 August.