Chop wood, carry water. The well is running dry for the titular noise punk band of Ken’ichi Ugana’s The Gesuidouz. Their shows in their hometown of Tokyo are yielding crowds of twos, poor sales of their latest album have landed them $20,000 in debt with their label, and their blowhard manager (Yuya Endo) is losing his patience. He gives them an ultimatum: move out to a rural farm with subsidized housing and pump out a hit between sowing the fields, or hang up the studded hat. Gutter punks to the end, The Gesuidouz leave the office fuming and with middle fingers up, but they’re out of options. They pack up the van and head for the hills. Punk goes country.
The Gesuidouz is another entry in the crowded canon of tortured-artist stories, but it introduces a rare and healthy dose of ebullience — less Inside Llewyn Davis than the Flight of the Conchords with writer’s block and a chip on their shoulder. It’s a familiar space for Ugana. The young but already prolific director has spent the past few years churning out Fantasia-friendly midnight genre flicks that carve a comfortable niche between B-movie gore and shark-jumping gags. The Gesuidouz, though, largely trades body horror for an absurdist-lite and decidedly sweet examination of the creative process. The band name-checks Dario Argento and William Friedkin; the cast was instructed to study up on the bone-dry punchlines of Aki Kaurismäki and Roy Andersson.
The Gesuidouz, whose name translates roughly to “sewage,” might cut a tough image at first glance, but they stumble in and out of pratfalls and deadpans as if they’re aspiring toward their own caricatures. It’s a dichotomy that largely works, and many of The Gesuidouz’s jokes let needed air into a genre that often suffocates on its own piety. Masao, a guitarist played by Imamura Leo, nurses an ohagi addiction that efficiently subverts the tired drug arcs that dog so many American rock biopics. A host of winking cameos (including, somehow, Lloyd Kaufman) are jarring enough to skirt meta-fatigued groans and land some giggles with the late-nite Troma crowd. And in the movie’s most inspired visual choice, the band’s lead, Hanako (Natsuko), finally pens a hit by literally vomiting up a wisecracking cassette tape that would have found a welcome home in Peter Jackson’s Braindead. It’s a refreshing direction, but The Gesuidouz’s levity occasionally runs up a tab on the dime of its drive and agency.
The Scandinavian droll with which Ugani trained his cast often runs counter to its own broad punchlines and punk ethos. The latter of which, admittedly, isn’t all that important — Kohl’s has been selling Sex Pistols graphic tees since the last quarter-century of the Queen’s life — but The Gesuidouz is sorely absent the grit that lets filthy staples like Party Monster and Return of the Living Dead endure. A sanitized swing toward rock and roll is forgivable; Ugani’s movie lands its most critical missteps in tonal malaise. Songwriting is often a matter of sitting around and waiting for something to happen, but The Gesuidouz’s 93 minutes can only spin so many goofball expressions and slapstick non sequiturs before its tapestry starts to feel a bit thin.
But while its comedy might be inconsistent, The Gesuidouz hits its stride when it stops searching for the joke — but never, somehow, at the expense of its lighthearted charm. For Hanako, a hefty bill with the label isn’t the only thing driving the urgency behind the band’s next single. Her walls are adorned with the dead rockstars that came before her — Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious — and on the eve of a milestone birthday, Hanako is convinced she’s destined to become the latest member of the 27 club. Suffering for one’s art has been mythologized to the point of glory, and Hanako holds her impending doom like a dreadful chalice, as if dying young will canonize her legacy in a fashion her songwriting never could. For so many young creatives, pain seems a prerequisite to great art instead of a boundary their heroes have hurdled; that Ugani deconstructs that myth is a gift to whatever young punk might stumble across his movie after hours.
“How nice of you to come to this shithole!” smiles Tome, the owner of the farm The Gesuidouz visit to pluck weeds and strings. Tome hunches and grins through her fields of leeks and radishes with the end-of-life buoyant wisdom we all aspire to, and if she doesn’t understand the noise punk of her new tenants, she’s at least happy they make it. Tome’s relationship with Hanako is The Gesuidouz’s ace in the hole, the sort of odd-couple friendship we have once or twice in a lifetime if we’re lucky. That the band sounds like shit, to Tome, is irrelevant. “It’s hard for me to understand what’s good about your songs,” she tells a Hanako on the verge of calling it quits, “but it’s amazing to be able to create something that others don’t understand at all.” For the first time in the movie, Hanako smiles. Tomorrow — her 27th birthday — she’ll pick up the pen.
Published as part of Japan Cuts 2025.
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