Andrew Cook
MPD Psycho is a live-action Japanese miniseries, with all six episodes helmed by famed filmmaker Takashi Miike. It premiered on May 2, 2000 and ran for the next six weeks on Japan’s WoWow satellite network, was released on DVD in Japan by Pony Canyon in 2000, and in Australia by Siren Visual in 2005. Despite being based on a well-known manga and directed by one of the most famous filmmakers in the world, a physical US release has yet to be issued.
MPD Psycho tells the story of Kazuhiko Amamiya, a former police profiler and emergent alter ego of Yosuke Kobayashi, also a profiler, who dissociated after witnessing the grisly death of his wife. The murder was committed by Shinji Nishizono, a killer he’d been pursuing. Amamiya solved the case, shooting and killing Nishizono, then retired and eventually remarried. Years later, a new string of murders occurs bearing similarities to Nishizono’s work, and Tooru Sasayama, the lead investigator (and Amamiya’s best friend), pulls him back into the field to try and stop the killing. If this so far feels a little familiar, don’t worry, it’s both very purposeful and just the beginning.
In the original set of murders, all the victims had a mysterious bar code somehow imprinted on one of their eyes, the provenance and purpose of which largely eluded investigators. The latest wave of killings have all been committed by different people, with methods too similar to Nishizono to ignore, but also with important differences varying from person to person, with every single perpetrator possessing the same bar code as Nishizono’s victims.
The cast is strong. Naoki Hosaka is solid as Amamiya, but the real highlight is the late Ren Osugi as Sasayama, the lead investigator. Sasayama worked on the original Nishizono killings and was promoted afterward, though his promotion turned out to be a thankless dead-end and his competence is constantly questioned by his superiors. Sasayama emerges as a highly complicated figure, defined by his contradictions. His loyalty and infidelity, dedication and fear, tenacity and caprice are all on full display, and Osugi is more than able to thread the needle, pulling it together into a complete and sensitive portrait of a man whose own identity is as fractured as his partner.
This concept of fractured identity is a core theme throughout the series. Amamiya has Dissociative Identity Disorder, Sasayama’s is split off in several different ways. His personal and professional personas are in constant competition, and he leads a double life with a wife and a mistress. Miike builds this into a look at Japanese society as a whole, especially of the Showa era, during which the series takes place. As our heroes venture deeper into the dizzying weeds of this mystery, it ties into questions of Japanese culture, of the nature of their long-standing relationship with the United States, who they were before that, and where they’re going, especially as Japan enters the modern internet age.
Two of my favorite actresses happen to pop up in here as well. Chiaki Kuriyama (Battle Royale, Kill Bill) appears as a Christian high-schooler who instigates a mass shooting, kicking off a brilliant episode about the Japanese school system. David Lynch regular and former pop idol Nae Yuuki appears as a daycare worker murdering women and harvesting their late-term pregnancies as part of the bizarre, byzantine labyrinth our characters are trying to plumb.
MPD Psycho wastes no time in embodying all the gonzo bravura you’d expect of Miike’s work. Nothing is diluted stylistically by virtue of being made for television. If anything, it’s one of the most dense and surreal works of his career. It’s pointedly metatextual, examining how culture informs media and then back again, reflected through the show’s artificial SOV aesthetic. The sprawling narrative provides ample reward for repeat viewings and the heterogeneous aesthetic constantly shifts things up, calling attention to the new artistic possibilities of the digital age. I’d compare it in many ways to Legion, except even more fluid and outré. I highly recommend this show to anyone with a taste for the bizarre.
