ANTENNA (Japan, 2003)
Directed by: Kazuyoshi Kumakiri
Starring: Ryo Kase, Akemi Kobayashi, Daisuke Kizaki

“…consistently engrossing, rich in atmosphere and psychological texture…more emotional than the majority of Japanese films…”

David Rooney, Variety

Director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s first film, Kichiku, was an endurance test in splatter about a falling out between political radicals which critics said “makes the Last House on the Left look like Little House on the Prairie,” but his third film, ANTENNA, ditches horrific gore in favor of some of the most damaging emotional anguish ever put onscreen. A repressed memory movie for the jack-off brigade, it comes through fuzzed and smeared with emotional static like a psychic transmission from the past.


Ten years after the disappearance of eight year-old Marie, the news of a missing little girl who’s been found chops open a hideous can of worms for the family of Yuichiro, Marie’s older brother. Since her disappearance, mom has turned to crackpot religions, blighting everything she touches with her toxic denial. Little brother, Yuya, born after Marie vanished, is given to seizures, and he believes that Marie is connected to him via psychic antenna. Dad has fallen ill and died, and the uncle (who lived with the family) has killed himself.

In a desperate attempt to remember what happened to Marie, Yuichiro puts himself in the hands of an aggressively exacting prostitute, and the movie segues into some of the most intensely painful scenes of sex therapy ever filmed. Not physically painful, but painful in the way that searing, barbed memories jerked out of our most delicate orifices and thrown hot and bitter in our faces can be painful. Into this chaos comes a television crew whose producer thinks he can finally solve the mystery of what happened and, expectedly, chaos ensues.


Elliptical, obscure, haunting, unforgettable and traumatic, ANTENNA hits you in the brain like a sack full of hammers.