You may not have heard of prolific Japanese director Yasuzo Masumura, but once you've seen this movie both his name and vision will be indelibly stamped on your memory. Originally released in 1969, Blind Beast is the disturbing tale of a sightless sculptor who's fixated with the female form. It's an obsession that drives him to kidnap an artist's model and hold her captive in his bizarre studio, while he creates a statue based on her perfect physique.
However, his initial intention becomes overwhelmed by an unquenchable love for her, the power of which destroys all rationale and sends the duo into an all-consuming spiral of sadomasochistic perversity. It's a descent that climaxes in a scene even more unsettling than Ai No Corrida's (1976) dick-dismemberment.
Aside from the Marquis de Sade-esque, car-crash compulsion of the plot, what makes this drama such a masterpiece is the surreal set-design. The mad artist's studio is dominated by a gigantic reclining study of a naked woman, surrounded by walls emblazoned with outsized plaster-casts of eyes, ears, breasts, mouths and assorted limbs. Visualise a creative collision between the cinema and art world's greatest minds such as Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, David Cronenberg, Alexandro Jodorowsky and David Lynch. Yes, it really is that weirdly imaginative and disconcerting, and few films are more deserving of the adage, 'You've never seen anything like it.'
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