Since they were both five, Ryosuke has been stalked by Momoko - the ugliest girl in the village. Her love for Ryosuke is so boundless that she has her face surgically altered to suit his taste - but still he wants nothing to do with her. Ryosuke goes in for fleeting romance - for example, with the girlfriend of a gangster boss. But when he finds out about their affair, he has Ryosuke's little finger hacked off. Magically, the finger falls into Momoko's hands, and she uses it to clone Ryosuke, so she can finally have him (or almost him) for herself. And this is just the first five minutes of Lisa Takeba's short-but-powerful feature debut. Just like in her previous short films, the director - who cut her teeth in the advertising world and as the writer of a video game - throws a lot of genres and techniques into the mix: from science fiction to gangster films, from hospital eroticism to animation. Hectic and absurd, but with its heart in the right place. © IFFR
Direction
Lisa Takeba's ad-world maximalism crammed into 65 minutes.
Editing
Genre whiplash executed with deranged confidence.
Practical Effects
Gleefully grotesque finger-based body horror.
Director
Lisa Takeba
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Director Lisa Takeba wrote for video games before filmmaking, which explains the 'level-up' energy of every scene change.
The yubitsume finger-cutting ritual is real yakuza tradition, but here it becomes grotesque romantic comedy fuel—classic Takeba tonal sabotage.
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