Onishi Kenji: ‘I think my films are living beings, the pictures on the screen are their skin. Some parts of the skin are thick, others are thin. Some may be injured or infected, others may be ill. Squareworld is a fairly unhealthy film. It looks as if dark drops of blood could ooze out at any moment. I conceived this film in an avant-garde way, with a surrealist plot, very exaggerated colour variations and grainy images, and I put the three main constituents of the exploitation film in it: sex, violence and splatter. By mixing togethercontrasting genres, I wanted to add a kind of black humour. There is also an immoral, antieeminist layer in my films, that always evokes protests at screenings. But I do that deliberately: deep within I am grinning when my films are written off as the work of a murder-happy psychopath.’Tony Rayns: ‘Squareworld has a stark, minimal narrative: a drug-addicted man kidnaps a young woman from the hills, holds her prisoner and eventually kills her and disposes of her body. We learn almost nothing about either the victim or her tormentor, and the film contains no moral judgments. The long, unedited takes are distancing, even alienating, while the texture and distorted colour of the images exert a decadent aesthetic appeal.’
