Tetsuo: The Iron Man

Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

1989 / 67min / DCP

That the world of the future was to be increasingly shaped by Asia was a central tenet of cyberpunk, and so it should come as no surprise that one of the greatest of cyberpunk films came from the Land of the Rising Sun. Man and machine feel the urge to merge in Tsukamoto’s utterly indescribable midnight movie staple, an assault-on-the-senses body horror running of the gauntlet which centers on an anonymous salaryman who begins to transform himself into a man of steel, his waking nightmare captured in twitchy camerawork and lurid, gritty black-and-white 16mm. A symphony of sex, steel, and scarification, set to a scraping industrial clangor.

Distributor: AGFA

Part of A Cyberpunk Canon