If you’ve ever seen Audition, or Onibaba, or any other Japanese horror movie, you’ll know there’s a discord between the importance of the visuals and the need to make thoroughgoing sense; generally these stories will maintain a comprehensible narrative thrust while not worrying quite so rigidly about the smaller details. Teruo Issii’s film of Edogawa Rampo’s 1926 novel Panorama Island Otan (incorporating elements of the author’s other works) gives every indication that it’s not going to bother even trying to make sense – and then, albeit fairly clumsily, manages to pull pretty much everything together in its final act.

It begins with Hirosuke Hitomi (Yoshida) surrounded and attacked by a dozen or more semi-naked women (it actually begins with a close-up on one of those women’s breasts; director Ishii isn’t afraid of fetishising something he’s clearly fond of), after which it becomes clear that Hitomi has been incarcerated against his will in an insane asylum, and has lost his memory of who he is and where he’s from. Escaping from the institution, Hitomi meets a girl who works in a circus, and when the pair share memories of the same song, she suggests the investigation into his past take him to the coast – at which point, the girl is mysteriously killed and Hitomi goes on the run. Arriving at his destination, he discovers he’s the spitting image of the recently deceased Genzaburo Komoda, whose identity he assumes. Hitomi is then caught in something of a sex triangle between Genzaburo’s wife and one of the servant girls, while his interest is piqued by the story of Genzaburo’s father, who has apparently gone mad and withdrawn to a mysterious island off the coast, which he is seemingly rebuilding in the image of his own dreams.

Or nightmares, as it turns out. Freud would have had a field day with the first half of Horrors of Malformed Men, which takes elements familiar from the likes of Vertigo and replays them as a kind of surreal investigation into the self – and more so the sexually driven self – but once Hitomi reaches the island things get even more bizarre and dreamlike. Here we finally meet Genzaburo’s father, Jogoro Komoda (Hijikata, previously better known as the choreographer who created the performance art Butoh, as is obvious from his theatrical “acting”), and after some particularly freakish business involving human experiments – it’s all very Island Of Doctor Moreau – Jogoro volunteers some explanations and there’s around twenty minutes of spoken exposition, with occasional flashbacks.

It’s a shame that ending is quite so pragmatically presented, as prior to that Ishii’s film – beautifully restored and with a plethora of extras from Arrow – is rather poetic, if both difficult and deliberately shocking.

Extras: trailer, two Japanese cinema experts commentaries, co-screenwriter interview, Malformed Memories featurette, Far East Film Festival featurette

HORRORS OF MALFORMED MEN / DIRECTOR: TERUO ISHII / SCREENPLAY: TERUO ISHII, MASAHIRO KAKEFUDA / STARRING: TERUO YOSHIDA, YUKIE KAGAWA, TERUKO YUMI, TATSUMI HIJIKATA / CERT: 18 / RELEASE DATE: 17TH SEPTEMBER 2018