Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)

Original title

鉄男

Directed by

Shinya Tsukamoto

Genre

drama film, horror film, cyberpunk, science fiction film, biopunk, arthouse science fiction film

Country

Japan

Runtime

1h 07m

Rated

NR

Rating

7.0 of 10 from 711 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A salaryman finds metal sprouting from his body and becomes haunted by violent sexual visions. He connects with a hit-and-run victim who is also turning into a machine.

unsettlingfreneticsurrealvisceralclaustrophobicbody-horrorgrittydreamlikechaotic

What happens

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (鉄男, Tetsuo; 'iron man') is a 1989 Japanese science fiction horror film directed, written, produced, and edited by Shinya Tsukamoto. The film centers on an unnamed Japanese salaryman who wakes up to find pieces of metal sprouting from various parts of his body and becomes haunted by visions of metal-oriented sexual fantasies. As the man steadily becomes a hybrid of man and machine, he develops a connection with a victim from a hit-and-run accident, who is undergoing a similar transformation. The film was the first feature-length film by Tsukamoto after he spent his youth creating film shorts and entering Japanese experimental theatre. Through his theatre work, he met like-minded people to perform in plays and later short films such as Kei Fujiwara and Tomorowo Taguchi. Filming proved to be difficult, as much of the cast and crew abandoned the production and only Taguchi and Tsukamoto arrived on set to finish the film. After winning the Grand Prize at the Fantafestival in Italy, the film grew in popularity in Japan, becoming a top seller on home video for non-mainstream cinema. Outside Japan, critics compared the film to the work of directors Sam Raimi, David Cronenberg, and David Lynch, while still finding the film to be original and difficult to parse. Tsukamoto directed a sequel titled Tetsuo II: Body Hammer in 1992, and a third film Tetsuo: The Bullet Man in 2009. In 2012, Michael Brooke of Sight & Sound declared the film "remains one of the most pulverisingly effective sci-fi horror films of the past quarter of a century". In Japan, the film magazine Kinema Junpo included the film on their list of top 200 Japanese films in 2009. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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