"Why me, and not you?"

Organ is ostensibly about a pair of cops that run afoul of an organ-smuggling ring, but that turns out to be misleading and irrelevant. Organ is actually a nightmare of indignity, mutilation, and degradation, the brainchild and directorial debut of Kei Fujiwara, who'd previously contributed to Shinya Tsukamoto's infamous Tetsuo.

I'm really not sure how to describe this movie, but I guess it's easiest to say what it isn't. It's not like the Nishimura gross-outs I've been following, those are actually fairly conventionally plotted and shot, they're just really campy and audacious poor-taste comedies like Peter Jackson used to make. Organ takes itself deadly seriously, and operates on some kind of mean dream logic I wasn't entirely able to process. The overall flow of the movie is such that it's impossible to tell whether any particular bodily flux is "really" happening or just hallucinations of a deranged mind, and that's before we even get into the revelation that one of the cops has a twin.

It's not like David Cronenberg's movies either; he and Fujiwara both relish in documenting fleshly mutation, but Organ never shows any catharsis or ecstacy in the change. The corruption is just the visible sign of the characters' spiritual decay; even the people who are outwardly unblemished are rotting on the inside. The thesis is that everyone is an oozing, greasy pile of meat stumbling through an immoral cosmos until we finally rot completely.

I wouldn't recommend this movie, or even say I really enjoyed it, but I can't seem to get it off my mind, and that definitely counts for something.