Review: Yasuzo Masumura's "Blind Beast" starts of as a typical erotic thriller. Aki, played by Mako Midori, begins to deliver a somber voice-over relaying the films events from its mysterious opening through a spiral into unexplored regions of human feelings and emotions.

The focus of the film is tight and claustrophobic. With only three roles during the entire course of the movie, attention never wanes or strays from the central conflict, which on the outside is a horrific story of kidnapping and abuse volleyed back and forth between the beautiful model Aki and the sight-impaired artist Michio, and the chains that bind him to his controlling mother.

Michio, being blind since the day he was born, absorbs his environment through the experiences of others. He hears stories detailing the brightness of the sun, and pictures the sky and clouds as best he can through the heightened senses his blindness has left him to focus on. Unsatisfied with the limits brought about by this method, he finds the most intimate form of human contact allows him a world beyond that of sight.

His fingers become his eyes as he stays locked up in his studio, a horrifying amalgamation of all the senses, spread out in an octagonal fashion throughout a large room. Each wall depicts a portion of the human body; eyes, mouth, ears, nose, legs, arms and breasts. It's all a testament to his obsession with the female physique, culminating in the two gigantic female figures spread across the studio floor. The headless bodies lay parallel to one another, one facing up and the other with its back to the ceiling.

Aki falls into Michio's disturbing plot of desires kicking and screaming all the way. it takes a while for her to feel resigned to her fate as a model to the lunatic sculptor. She tries over and over to deceive him, but with his mother there as a third party, she finds it difficult to escape. Mako Midori does a fantastic job as Aki, playing the part with a certain amount of cunning that spreads her character far apart from the typical helpless woman in captivity.

Veteran actress Noriko Sengoku fills in the shoes of the mother, who despite being ever the servant to Michio's needs, holds a strong veil of control over him. Giving him what he wants keeps him in a childlike state of complacency, but when Aki begins to act like she loves him, all of his mother's control starts to be thrown off balance.

Michio's naivety is only perpetuated by his mother's insistence that he stay safely under her wing. Aki disrupts their relationship and creates a horrible turn of events. The latter portion of the film is surreal and focuses on humans reaching the most basic of sensory reception and emotion. If touch and taste are the base of our senses, then what happens when we go deeper? The unrelenting exploration of the human body can only go so far. It's in this segment that agony and ecstasy are blended together skillfully by Masumura. The beauty in the most carnal acts mingle with desperation and the loss of identity and concept of time.

Yasuzo Masumura's adaptation of the story by Edogawa Ranpo brings these characters full circle in their own ways, at least in the case of Michio and Aki. Where Aki begins in the film mentally, is distinctly opposite to where she finds herself as the movie progresses. While Michio discovers aspects of human feeling he has spent his entire life only dreaming of, it only serves to revert him to a state of pure animal lust.

Every shot in "Blind Beast" is framed in such a way that the viewer can feel the nagging enclosure of Michio's studio and his haunting visage when it quickly becomes the only thing visible in the room. The two blend in to the gigantic sculptures as they lay sprawled out across elephantine breasts and Aki begins to mimic the positions of the sculpture crafted from her figure. The visuals in the movie continue to stand out for some time after its ending.