Piercing

Great style, precious little substance

In most movies like this, these sort of psycho, sexual thrillers, the female character is there to be a damsel in distress, there to be naked or there to be killed in a really brutal way. This movie sets up, here's a guy who wants to kill a prostitute, so you think the movie is getting to deliver all those things, but it so doesn't. The beauty of Mia's character is that she doesn't let herself be any of those tropes, she doesn't let herself be a damsel in distress, get killed, be taken advantage of; she really is the one with all the power and the one that's playing on the mind games.

• Nicholas Pesce; "Nicolas Pesce on His Film Adaptation of Murakami Ryu's Piercing" (Eric Ortez Garcia); Screen Anarchy (October 2, 2018)

From Nicholas Pesce, the writer and director of The Eyes of My Mother (2016), and based on the 1994 novel by Ryû Murakami (who also wrote the novel upon which Takashi Miike's similarly themed Ôdishon (1999) was based), Piercing is a darkly comic psychosexual thriller. Partly a screwball comedy about a fastidious man's attempt to murder a prostitute, and his confusion and helplessness when he realises that that prostitute is far more disturbed than he is, the film dares the audience to attempt to figure out who is in charge at any given moment, and to ponder whether one (or both) of these characters would actually be quite happy to be the other's victim. Purposely made to look like a sleazy seventies skin flick (the kind you might expect to see being shot on The Deuce), the film's sense of nostalgia drips off the screen, manifest in everything from the music borrowed from giallo films to the art-deco production design to the patently fake urban skyline to the lurid opening credits (complete with retro "Feature Presentation" card). In this sense, Pesce is a stylist, in the best sense of the term. However, at the moment, he is a stylist without much to say; as in _The Eyes of My Mot...