Visitors (Complete Edition) 2023

Have you ever done it with your Dad?

The film opens with a stark, unsettling question that drags the viewer into a world of routine cruelty and blurred boundaries. We meet Miki Yamazaki, a young prostitute, as she tries to coax her father, Kiyoshi, into a sex act. He films the encounter for a documentary he is making about Japanese youths, torn between revulsion and a disturbing sense of complicity. Miki coldly sets a price of 50,000 yen for the act, and what follows exposes a family structure hollowed out by violence, power, and voyeurism. The scene lingers on humiliation and a brittle dynamic: Kiyoshi professes disgust with himself even as he agrees, and Miki wastes no time flaunting his failure, christening him a “minuteman” before squeezing the encounter for still more money.

Moments later, the tone shifts to the external violence that will punctuate the rest of the film. A man in a red shirt—the Visitor Q—stares on from a distance as Kiyoshi waits for a train. The Visitor strikes with a rock through a window, knocking Kiyoshi unconscious in a matter-of-fact act that feels almost clinical in its timing. This abrupt intrusion marks the Visitor as a disruptive force who will drift through the family’s life, if only as a catalyst for further deterioration.

The narrative then cuts to a vaster sense of domestic ruin in the scene titled “Have you ever hit your mom?” Here, the mother, Keiko, is revealed to be scarred and beaten, her face marked by the marks of violence. The teenage son, Takuya, vents his frustrations by vandalizing the apartment and lashing out at his mother with a rug beater. Fireworks from bullies outside intensify the sense of danger, while Keiko, in a parallel act of self-destructive coping, injects heroin. The Visitor quietly resumes his watchful presence as the household cracks under accumulated harm. Kiyoshi returns home with the Visitor in tow, announces that the Visitor will stay for a while, and the family resumes a disturbing routine that oscillates between resignation and ritual.

As Kiyoshi revisits old tapes, a buried memory emerges: he was raped by a group of teenagers in the past. This revelation adds a grim, shameful texture to the acts that unfold, reframing the family’s violence as something cumulative—past trauma fueling present cruelty. The following day, Kiyoshi witnesses his son being beaten and robbed by schoolmates, filming the incident with a sense of unsettling pride as if the violence on screen validates his own detachment.

Keiko continues to work as a prostitute, and the camera follows her as she disciplines a client with a belt, then seeks heroin in a park. When she returns home, the house carries a new, almost ritualized pattern: the puzzle pieces on the floor have been rearranged into a trail that ends at a photograph of the daughter, and the Visitor teaches Keiko a strange lactation technique, turning private bodies into instruments of shared, uneasy pleasure.

At dinner, the atmosphere shifts to a rare moment of apparent warmth: Keiko has prepared a lavish meal, buoyed by her interaction with the Visitor. Takuya, however, remains sullen and volatile, hurling hot soup at his mother. Keiko’s response is calm but decisive—she leaves, then returns with a carving knife, and the family dynamic tilts toward a new, dangerous balance where violence becomes a family spectacle that everyone rather than no one is willing to deny.

The next day intensifies the breakdown. Takuya is bullied again, and Kiyoshi tapes the scene from his car with the Visitor and the co-worker. The co-worker, fed up with Kiyoshi’s escalating methods, attempts to leave; he follows on foot and is sexually assaulted by the assailant, while the Visitor records—neither offering protection nor intervention. In a brutal turn, Kiyoshi inadvertently smothers his victim to death. The dead body is moved to the greenhouse, and the Visitor is enlisted to fetch garbage bags. Keiko, undeterred, strips down and reveals herself in a garbage bag, lactation surging across the floor as the Visitor watches, sheltering himself with an umbrella.

The couple then begins a macabre act of preparation as Kiyoshi draws on the woman’s body with a marker, staging the corpse for dismemberment and filming the process for their own disturbing documentary. A grotesque irony unfolds as he becomes aroused by the sight, a moment that ends in horror when his hand emerges smeared with feces and he discovers the body’s rigidity traps him in place. Keiko assists, rushing to buy vinegar to dissolve the remains, and a heroin dose is administered to free him from the increasing terror of the scene.

With the atmosphere of their home fully corrupted, the pair engage in the grisly work of dismembering the co-worker’s corpse while Takuya finally arrives, facing his bullies in the front yard. The parents’ violence becomes a kind of perverse family ritual that appears to bind them together in a new, feral form of unity. The film then cuts to a surreal tableau: the son lies among a floor pooled with milk, and the Visitor departs but not before leaving a final, ambiguous sense of complicity and closure, as if the house’s chaos has been temporarily resolved.

Outside, the Visitor encounters Miki once more. She is bruised by his presence, but she returns home only to find her mother and father gathered in the greenhouse—her mother wearing a tarpaulin, her father nursing at her breast. The image is stark and disturbing in its finality: a family recomposed around a shared, grotesque ritual of pain, power, and care, with Miki joining them in a final, unsettling acceptance of the Visitor’s influence.

The film ends not with moral resolution but with a chilling, almost ritualized synthesis of all that has come before: a portrait of a family whose bonds are defined by violence, coercion, and a disturbing intermingling of sexuality, abuse, and control, held together by a figure who enters to disrupt and then to consolidate the chaos.