TETSUO: THE IRON MAN

This special screening of TETSUO: THE IRON MAN is hosted at our Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse Cinema as a part of PHANTOMS OF THE FIREHOUSE, presented by MUBI.

Saturday, October 28, at 7:00 PM CST
1326 W Hollywood Ave, Chicago

PHANTOMS OF THE FIREHOUSE is a screening series presented by MUBI. Featuring four films over two days, it’s the perfect way to kick off the Halloween weekend. Whether you’re looking for a few scares or your new favorite film, stop by the Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse this weekend!

TETSUO: THE IRON MAN (A Review by M. Woods)

It is an absolute privilege to partner with MUBI in presenting one of the greatest horror movies ever made, TETSUO: THE IRON MAN. An underground, surrealist masterpiece of extreme Japanese horror, directed by one of the genre’s foremost auteurs, Shinya Tsukamoto, TETSUO THE IRON MAN plunges us into an abysmal, metal-hydraulic contortion of human reality relentlessly torn apart by the Id. In one the most disturbingly tactile cinematic experiences, Tsukamoto condemns Capitalist escapism and its exterminating, hyper-violent core.

Tetsuo clearly evokes the extremes of 20th century Japan, following the atrocities of nuclear war and the hyperreal nightmare of a misogynist, mechanomorphic hell, a cinematic dissolution of the body into endless decay and waste. The movie opens up into ferocious stop-motion sequences, swirls of industrial dissonance that pits our consciousness deeper into this Futurist fantasy of a body - free of its mortality, but fused, abraded, and finally destroyed by the Demi-God sprouting from within. Tsukamoto depicts this evolutionary destiny towards the cyborg in explicit terms. Tetsuo’s misogyny and compulsion for lust is bound in rupture and destruction, where even the sexual is replaced by purely mechanical sadism and domination. Not for the faint of heart, Tetsuo the Iron Man stands as one of the most influential works of cinema - a standard bearer for both horror and underground film.

On Saturday, October 28 at 7PM Central, visit Chicago Filmmakers for TETSUO: THE IRON MAN.

For tickets: www.chicagofilmmakers.org/upcoming-screenings-and-events/

A review by M. Woods