R100

The Japanese writer-director Hitoshi Matsumoto could be described as a specialist in one-joke movies, but you have to admit they're mighty strange jokes. This one involves a salesman (Nao Omori) who visits a bondage club where he agrees to let dominatrices attack him any place, any time – rather like the way Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther series used to be ambushed by Burt Kwouk as his karate training partner. Through much of what follows, the viewer too is kept in a state of nervous anticipation of the next attack; shot in drab near-sepia tones, the film is like an experiment set up to test the comic value of repetition and delay. It's also a surprising example of Matsumoto's taste for the kind of paranoid science fiction where reality itself is put in doubt; as the director himself spells out in a cameo as an irate cop, the submissive posture of the masochist is sincere but also a charade, just as art is a real experience founded on a lie. Though it's not as elegant as his 2009 film Symbol – or as satisfying, especially if you make the mistake of expecting a statement about gender – it's unmistakably a product of the same unique imagination.