Written and directed by prolific filmmaker Sion Sono, Tag hits you at the outset with a gory set-piece as shy, poetry-writing schoolgirl Mitsuko narrowly avoids a malevolent gust of wind that slices her fellow students in half. It’s quite the opener and sets the tone for the film that follows. As Mitsuko makes her way back to school, everything seems fine and she begins to question her sanity. With her friend Aki and two other girls, Sur and Taeko, Mitsuko ditches school to head out into the woods to try and clear her head and figure out what’s real and what isn’t. From there on in, Tag becomes increasingly surreal and it’s soon apparent something even weirder than could be expected from that brutal opening is going on.
It’s been commented on already that Tag is a mix of arthouse and exploitation and that’s a fair assessment. Sono divides his film equally into beautifully shot emo whimsy and grinding, gory violence and CGI blood. There’s an explanation for everything at the end that ties all of the mystery together in an outlandish but relatively satisfying way that reinforces the feminist themes running throughout. Whether you enjoy this or not probably depends on your familiarity with Japanese cinema in general and the purposefully jarring, duelling tones of this film in particular. It’s well acted, often remarkably aesthetically captivating and whips by in less than 90 minutes. For those inclined, there’s plenty of subtexts to get stuck into. If not, well, there’s more than enough onscreen action and blood to keep your attention.
There are plenty of sequences of graphic bloodletting one minute and serene nature the next and for a recent film, as you might expect, it’s all very sharp and clear. The transfer on Eureka’s release is resplendent and serves this very visually orientated film well. What’s sadly not resplendent is the extra material, because there basically isn’t any. You just get a trailer that does a fine job of miss-selling almost everything interesting about the movie to make it appear a dumb grindhouse knock-off. No commentaries, no featurettes or anything at all, which is a shame as there’s enough to unpick about the film to warrant it, so perhaps there’s just nothing available.
If you really just don’t care about the supplementary material, or you must have the film on disc or have no other way to catch it, that’s pretty much the only reason to pick up this release. Overall, this is a decent and most definitely interesting film but is an inessential release.
TAG / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: SION SONO / STARRING: REINA TRIENDL, MARIKO SHINODA, ERINA MANO / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
