Author: Bryan Loomis
The Katakuris purchase an inn in a scenic area hoping that development and guests will follow. This is a pretty familiar setup with stakes, but as this is a Takashi Miike movie, it undersells just how weird this thing is. In fact, we don’t even start there - we start with a sequence that’s mostly claymation where a weird creature eats a girl’s uvula, in turn both eats and is eaten by a bird. It doesn’t even end there. This zany and morbid streak runs through the movie. Despite being stuffed with ideas and techniques, The Happiness of the Katakuris commits to a consistent tone, and that’s what makes it work.
The claymation comes back a couple more times, which allows for some complex sequences outside of the scope of the film’s budget, otherwise. This is played humorously, with the characters’ faces overlaid on top of their clay selves when Miike wants to capture a facial expression. Alongside those sequences, Miike deploys musical numbers pretty liberally. The music is consistently really good, in a variety of styles to match the current situations of the characters.
When the Katakuris do get some guests, they immediately start dying, and the Katakuris start hiding the bodies. This is where much of the humor of the movie is derived from, and it made me laugh quite a few times. The first guest commits suicide by stabbing himself in the neck with his hotel key, even though he had a perfectly good knife with him. The second guest is a sumo wrestler so large he must be disposed of out of a second story window, in the funniest gag of the movie.
Each of the Katakuris gets their moment to shine in different ways. The daughter gets a love interest (who is maybe also the nephew of Queen Elisabeth), the mother and father have a fun musical number complete with karaoke subtitles, and the son tries to prove himself after his release from jail. But the highlight for me was the grandfather, who doesn’t get much of a subplot but is always around as a really loveable and human guy who just wants to hold his family together.
Of course things get complicated, buried bodies must be moved, the police must be evaded. But even into the third act the movie stays unpredictable, with some humorous twists I won’t spoil but are very smartly deployed. This tension of staying unpredictable while still staying tonally consistent in retrospect is what makes The Happiness of the Katakuris great.
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