Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Sixty-seven minutes of black-and-white 16mm industrial noise, and there is nothing else like it.

A man begins turning into scrap metal. That is the plot. Shinya Tsukamoto shot it over roughly eighteen months in Tokyo with a crew that mostly quit, doing the camera, the effects, the editing and one of the lead roles himself, largely in his own apartment.

The technique is the film: stop motion, single-frame animation, a camera on a skateboard, whip pans, and a Chu Ishikawa score of hammered metal that never stops. Watching it is closer to being shouted at for an hour than to following a story.

It is not enjoyable in any normal sense and it is one of the most influential things in this category. Everything from Nine Inch Nails videos to the look of modern body horror runs through it.

Sixty-seven minutes is the correct length. It would be unbearable at ninety.