Gozu

• Gozu started life as a low-budget V-Cinema (straight-to-video) production for Toei, then got plucked from those direct-to-video roots into the Directors' Fortnight at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, where it was reviewed on May 17 — that festival reception is what won it theatrical release overseas.
• The screenplay was written by Sakichi Sato — the same writer who scripted Miike's Ichi the Killer and who played the Charlie Brown character in Tarantino's Kill Bill. The full Japanese title, Gokudo kyofu dai-gekijo: Gozu, translates roughly to 'Yakuza Horror Theatre: Bull's Head,' and 'Gozu' (the ox/bull-headed figure) is drawn from Buddhist mythology, where Gozu and Mezu are the cow-headed and horse-headed guardians of hell.
• The script was turned around in roughly two weeks, and much of the dialogue in key scenes was improvised on set.
• The American actress playing the store owner's wife spoke no Japanese and read her lines phonetically off cue cards posted above her head. Miike decided on the spot to keep her halting delivery — and the visible cards — in frame for the comic, unsettling effect.
• More than five minutes had to be cut from the film to secure an R rating; an uncut unrated version was also released.
• The film stars Hideki Sone as Minami and Miike regular Sho Aikawa as Ozaki, and is openly indebted to David Lynch — critics and Miike alike have tied it to Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.

The whole Nagoya detour is Minami's repressed desire surfacing as nightmare. Ozaki's body disappearing is the trigger; everything after — the lactating innkeeper, the cow-headed messenger, the town that won't give straight answers — is Minami's subconscious refusing to let his 'brother' stay dead because he can't admit what Ozaki means to him. The literal rebirth at the end, Ozaki crawling back out of a woman's body fully grown, is desire made flesh: the only way Minami can have him is to have him reborn into a body he's allowed to want.

The cow-head and the milk run as one symbolic system. Gozu the demon ferries messages between the living and the dead, and the innkeeper's obsession with her own breast milk frames the entire town as a liminal birth-canal — a place where death and lactation, ending and beginning, are the same fluid. Minami isn't lost in a suburb; he's lost in a gestation chamber, and the ending is the town finally delivering what it was carrying.

Read straight, the opening chihuahua scene is the key the rest of the film keeps turning. Ozaki insisting a tiny dog is a trained yakuza assassin isn't just madness — it's the movie announcing its rule that anything can be lethal, sacred, or symbolic regardless of scale. Once you accept the killer chihuahua, the cow-headed god and the adult man born from a woman are simply that same logic taken to the end of the line.

A loyal yakuza foot soldier gets handed the worst assignment of his life: drive his unraveling "brother" Ozaki out to a Nagoya backwater and put him down. The body vanishes from the car, and the search drops Minami into a town that runs on dream-logic. A milk-obsessed innkeeper, a dead waiter, a man with a cow's head passing notes from the afterlife, and a woman who claims to be Ozaki — all of it tightening into a homoerotic anxiety that ends with the single most unforgettable rebirth in Miike's catalog.