A salaryman turns into iron in Shinya Tsukamoto’s visceral classic, chosen by our Guest of Honour Ben Wheatley.
After hitting a metal fetishist with his car, a Japanese salaryman begins a horrific, involuntary transformation into a man-machine hybrid, sprouting metal from various parts of his body and becoming haunted by visions of metal-oriented sexual fantasies. He develops a strange, telepathic connection with the metal fetishist as he keeps changing shape.
After more than 35 years, Shinya Tsukamoto’s low budget debut feature is still one of the most visceral and pulverising films in the sci-fi horror genre. While the director himself sees Tetsuo as the spawn of Videodrome and Blade Runner, it’s also distinctly Japanese, with the oppressive city and the suffocating salaryman culture as major themes. When asked for the meaning behind the film, Tsukamoto said that ‘the process in which human beings become iron is some kind of human condition’, and that he was interested in the eroticism of juxtaposing a soft body against hard steel.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man will be introduced by our Guest of Honour Ben Wheatley, who chose this title when we asked him about a film that influenced his career.
