A young couple runs over a man with their car without rescuing him. During the crash, a splinter of metal enters the boy's arm: this will first cause a strange infection and then initiate the "mutation" caused in revenge by the individual run over, a man who can control metal and who will haunt the young man until the final metamorphosis.
Tetsuo (Tetsuo: The Iron Man) is the first feature film directed by Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, A Snake of June, Nightmare Detective...), one of Japan's most extreme directors who gives us a sick and violent film with a strong visual impact. Shot in B&W, full of claustrophobic and evocative framing, the film alludes to an industrial society populated by machine-men, beings animated by a disturbing destructive madness.
Tetsuo is a film with violent imagery that casts itself in a hallucinated vision of life: the evolution of flesh, the fusion of body with metal, the deviant transformation in which man's worst instincts are reflected.
A pessimistic, tightly paced film that leaves no room for hope but projects the abrupt deterioration of the world in our minds in a crescendo of increasingly extreme and inevitable situations that will lead to ultimate destruction.
The film is devoid of dialogue, so everything relies on the expressiveness of the protagonists, plus the moans and background noises only add to the sense of unease and anguish that swirls throughout the film.
