LOVE WILL TEAR US APART

Wakaba is many things: one of the most kawaii grade-schoolers ever, the #1 fan of pop musician Kohei Shirasaki and someone with a particularly strong sense of righteousness. So when she witnesses her dorky classmate Koki being pushed around by two grade-A bullies, she can’t help but stand up for him. Not used to having someone, least of all a girl defend him, Koki is instantly smitten. Naturally, that’s why when his tormentors start picking on her, he goes berserk and catapults them out of the class window, falling to their deaths meters below… Seven years later, Wakaba is still very kawaii but now a groupie cruising around in the van of Kohei’s new band, which turns out to be filled with douchebags, her idol included. In search of a little fun before their next gig, they decide to have a barbecue with some teriyaki, beers and hopefully later on a bit of sweet lovin’. Wakaba really isn’t up for that and luckily for her, bodies still tend to show up abundantly wherever she goes. Violently mutilated bodies… What starts off as a saccharine kids melodrama quickly, unexpectedly and gloriously flies off the rails with lots of heads flying off once love enters into the picture. Director Kenichi Ugana – whose WILD VIRGINS we already wanted to screen at the BIFFF in 2020, but y’all know what happened that year – reinterprets Joy Division’s gloomy post-punk classic “Love Will Tear Us Apart” quite literally, as in shredding folks into pieces in the name of love. And it’s not simply a fantastic midnight movie. It also contains possibly the two greatest scenes involving sushi and belly tattoos in film history. We’re not kidding…