Tetsuo: The Iron Man

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Cast & Crew

Tomorowo Taguchi
Man
Voice

Kei Fujiwara
Woman
Voice

Nobu Kanaoka
Woman in Glasses
Voice

Shin'ya Tsukamoto
Metal Fetishist
Voice

Naomasa Musaka
Doctor
Voice

Renji Ishibashi
Tramp
Voice

Shin'ya Tsukamoto
Director

Shin'ya Tsukamoto
Writer

Shin'ya Tsukamoto
Producer

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Critic Reviews for Tetsuo: The Ironman

Audience Reviews for Tetsuo: The Ironman

• Nov 04, 2013

  The film loses any form of surrealism, art, or entertainment through its pure insanity. While I cringed a few times let out some "WTF" I was never impressed with what the B&W, Eraserhead style film did.
  

  Daniel D Super Reviewer
• Sep 18, 2013

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  Directors C Super Reviewer
• Jun 08, 2013

  Part man, part machine; Shin'ya Tsukamoto's 'Tetsuo The Iron Man' is the perfect allegory for the industrial world we inhabit. It tells the story of a salary man, who, upon hitting a metal fetishist (earlier seen inserting scrap metal into himself) begins the transformation himself from man to machine. Truly worthy of its avant garde classification, 'Tetsuo The Iron Man' is a testament to the originality that is unique to film and is an unequivocally intriguing and insane experience unlike any other. The artistic choices throughout the film give it a sense of uncontrollable madness, viewers are thrust into a black a white metal dystopia fraught with imaginative cinematography and visual, stop motion effects unlike any seen before. It's easy to occasionally feel lost during the film's 67 minute running time but that hardly takes away from the undeniable experience.
  

  Cameron S Super Reviewer
• Feb 07, 2012

  When I was helping a member of my family move to a coastal region I picked up a small movie book called "101 Sci-Fi Movies To Watch Before You Die" with this film having a write up. With my intrest piqued, I had a look at this Japanese surreal art/cyber punk sci-fi/horror film. In Tokyo, a man with a fetish for metal (Shin'ya Tsukamoto, who also directed, wrote, produced and edited the film) sticks bits of metal in him. Running around Tokyo screaming that the flesh around the metal is infected with maggots, he's hit by an unnamed driver (Tomorowo Taguchi) and his girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara) killing the Metal Fetishist. The unnamed man slowly discovers that in his rage of being killed, the Metal Fetishist is turning the man into a scrap metal monster. The film feels like a blender of David Lynch, David Cronenberg, a manga comic and a sci-fi film. The use of quick, fast pace editing with a variety of camera angles filmed on 16mm black and white film, use of flashbacks and use of stop motion (which is refreshing with today's overuse of CGI) as the man is slowly fused with rusty metal portray a cramped, bleak, surreal and nightmarish feel. It feels like a bunch of people's worst nightmares were plucked out of their minds and put on film. The soundtrack is a mix of electronic, industrial metal/rock and sounds of metal being bashed, scratched and scraped together to futher enhance the chilling feel of the film. The main story on paper looks simple but in reality could be any more futher from the truth. The main theme is the fear of our humanity being lost to the technology and mechanisation. The film has a constant feel of pessimism and futility of humanity's struggle against the machine/technology and ultimatly must accept it. One example is when the driver and passenger/girlfriend are going to have sex, the driver finds his penis has turned into a large mining drill. They fight until the girlfriend accepts the fact of the drill penis and thinks she can handle it. (Spoiler alert) She doesn't. I found this film to have a subtle irony of where it was made as Japan is a cross between ancient tradition to heavily use of very new technology. The end of the film ends on a very chilling and very sad note. The film left me shocked, horrified, disgusted but somewhat intrigued. I'm not interested nor do I like horror films (like Saw, Halloween etc, I prefer to see what the mind can do in a thriller rather than slicing and dicing body parts and whole bodies) but this one is a slight exception. It left me a bit interested in the technical aspects of how the film was made and also in the themes the film portrayed; is humanity's quest for new technology mean we will ultimatly be replaced by machines? Will we cope with mechanisation of most work forces? Can we trust the metal in the technology that we created?
  McCoy 9 Super Reviewer

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