The Happiness of the Katakuris Destroys Conventions

Leave it to Takashi Miike to violate audience expectations along with stylistic conventions. The prolific Japanese director, who produces a half-dozen films a year, is a confirmed genre jumper, gleefully leaping from gangland grossouts (the Dead or Alive series, Ichi the Killer), to psychological horror (the eerily unforgettable Audition) to dysfunctional family drama (Visitor Q).

In his latest U.S. release, The Happiness of the Katakuris, Miike tosses all of these elements together with claymation sequences and musical numbers, blending them into a mischievous black comedy that sardonically touts the value of family togetherness.

Finally, one stormy night (naturally enough) brings the arrival of their first lodger, who’s in no mood to receive the warm greeting offered by the entire Katakuri clan in the form of an up-tempo song and dance number. In fact, he’s antisocial enough to kill himself in their newly refurbished guestroom, casting suspicion on recently reformed petty criminal Masayuki.

Left to right: Shinji Takeda, Keiko Matsuzaka, Kenji Sawada, Tetsuro Tanba, 'Yurie,' Naomi Nishida.

Meanwhile, dimwitted daughter Shizue has fallen for a sham British naval officer, a Chinese con man who claims to be Queen Elizabeth’s half-nephew. With the bodies piling up and the police asking inconvenient questions, the Katakuri parents despair of ever hosting guests who can survive their first night in the hotel, much less providing a normal home life.

When the local authorities announce plans to route a new highway through the family’s makeshift graveyard, the Katakuris are forced to devise a plan for relocating the bodies, a project that culminates in a musical performance featuring the entire cast, including the decomposing corpses.

In this remake of Ji Woon Kim’s 1998 Korean comedy The Quiet Family, Miike borrows liberally from both The Sound of Music and music video conventions for an altogether unique and kitschy combination of horror and humor. Defying even the open-ended expectations that audiences typically bring to a Miike film, the director opens Katakuris with a bizarre claymation sequence in which a miniature goblin emerges from a woman’s soup, extracts her uvula and flies off to the mountainside above the Katakuri’s inn.

Claymation interludes continue to punctuate key events in the film, alternating with musical numbers and the increasingly sentimental storyline. Setting aside his gory brand of trenchant social commentary, Miike’s venture into family drama has its moments of hilarity, but the amateurishly staged musical numbers wear thin over the near-two hour running time and the theme of family harmony proves altogether too conventional for this typically nonconformist director.

Although it provides a pleasant pre-Halloween diversion, The Happiness of the Katakuris hardly heralds a promising new direction for Miike, whose talents are better suited to murder and mayhem than musical comedy.

The Happiness of the Katakuris, in Japanese with English subtitles, opens Oct. 25 in the Bay Area.

Reach Justin Lowe at nextwavve@yahoo.com.