There are horror films in which the persistence of violence and torture serves as a vehicle for a broader social commentary, like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Saló, which, when I first saw it, was perhaps the most unruly thing I’d ever witnessed. It was equal parts captivating and unwatchable, driven by a withering critique of fascism and its practitioners’ cruel, sadistic thirst for power and pleasure.
Then there are ones like Kuso, the debut feature by the electronic musician Flying Lotus. Kuso could scarcely be called a film proper; it’s more like a feature-length sequence of moving pictures and disparate narratives that seem perpetually engaged in a game of one-upmanship, the point being for each image to be grosser than the one that came before. In this, Flying Lotus succeeds with flying colors (and lots of other airborne things, like fecal matter and a slew of bodily fluids).
We begin in Los Angeles after an earthquake seems to have unleashed a plague upon the city’s inhabitants, every one of which is covered in boils protruding from their necks, lips and foreheads. This would be grotesque in any other film and yet, since the camera’s constant fixation on these subcutaneous horrors is established early on, it actually prevails as one of the film’s few palatable gimmicks.
Kuso is structured as a quadriptych, going back and forth between the tales of different deformed Angelenos with the help of “Steve”, Flying Lotus’ directorial pseudonym, who has them, and us, confront one obscenity after another: a woman chews through cement until her teeth decay (which recalls Pasolini’s despots feeding their prisoners cornbread stuffed with nails); a fetus is violently ripped from a womb; vermin crawl out of someone’s intergluteal cleft (their asshole); and a man is fellated by a sentient goiter attached to his sister’s neck.
When Kuso jumps from one story to the next, it’s punctuated by a glitchy television screen that recalls the one from which the goth-girl in The Grudge appears. In fact, there are many screens in Kuso – the film begins with a television broadcaster sermonizing about the apocalypse and, along the way, cuts to news anchors and prurient pay-per-view ads – all of which suggests various themes right at home with our contemporary moment, from the voyeurism of mindless channel-surfing to the way in which footage of violence and catastrophe has become a form of viral pornography in itself.
If the film wasn’t so cheekily self-aware it might be literally unbearable, but every so often it references its own grotesquerie: “This is garbage,” says a girl, hanging out with a furry alien voiced by Hannibal Buress, watching a man’s genitals getting stabbed repeatedly. “Toxically shocking,” say a pair of incredulous newscasters. It’s not that these moments make watching the film any less unpleasant, but rather that horror with a bit of levity is better than horror with none at all.
Since Flying Lotus is a music producer and DJ (not to mention the grand-nephew of Alice and John Coltrane), it might make sense to look at Kuso as a kind of extended music video, with a pulsing soundtrack that includes Aphex Twin, Thundercat and about half of FlyLo’s own unreleased album. The music doesn’t overwhelm the imagery but instead operates as a guide, an alternative sensation when you just can’t look at the screen any longer. And since the film has no pretense of narrative cohesion, it’s far more viable as a series of sonic vignettes than it is a conventional feature with plot and characterization, of which there is practically none.
Similarly to Saló, the most interesting aspects of Kuso have nothing to do with its sadism but rather with the tension between that sadism and the film’s occasional moments of visual splendor, which seem to derive a lot from Dadaist artists, such as Hannah Höch and contemporary ones like Leif Podhajsky, who’s done album cover art for Tame Impala and Lykke Li. The cut-and-paste collages that transition us from scene to scene are a Tumblr user’s wet dream.
But what’s it all worth if you leave Kuso on the verge of vomiting, or, like some folks at the film’s Sundance premiere, before it’s even over? I suppose there’s something to be said for art that’s indelible in its nastiness, but it appears FlyLo wanted to do more than make an utterly repellent film. Fortunately, there will be midnight movie buffs who appreciate its gore and even aesthetes who commend its vision. As for the rest: run, do not walk, to the nearest exit.
- Kuso will be available on Shudder in the UK and US with limited theatrical engagements from 21 July
