Freeze Me

Five years ago, Chihiro was raped by three men. The crime was captured on video, its images hanging over her life like a sword. Having left her rural hometown for the big city, she has managed to start anew. She works an office job and is about to marry her boyfriend when one of her assailants shows up at her doorstep, threatens blackmail and warns her: they are back, it is happening again. Now waking to a recurring nightmare, Chihiro is shocked into an unexpected set of actions action that will keep her abusers close, forever.

One of the most memorable Japanese exploitation films of the 2000s, Takashi Ishii’s Freeze Me places a heavier emphasis on stasis, anger, and the haunting effects of sexual assault, than is usually customary for the rape-revenge genre. Icy, shocking and carried by Harumi Inoue’s bold performance, the film also serves as a culmination of sorts for director Ishii’s formalism (A Night in Nude, Gonin) and his time at Nikkatsu. Shot on 16mm for a small budget on the studios’ sound stages, this is an bitter and confrontational work that isn’t easy to recommend to all, but that nonetheless lingers in the mind as one of its director’s most refined ‘women in peril’ films — inviting allegorical readings that complicates its own base function as provocation and emphasize the horrors of Japanese patriarchy.