SPECIAL FEATURE: DVD Review: Rubber’s Lover

Film: Rubber’s Lover
Running time: 90 mins
Director: Shozin Fukui
Starring: Yota Kawase, Sosuke Saito, Norimizu Ameya, Mika Kunihiro, Nao
Genre: Horror/Sci-Fi
Country: Japan

Region 1 release.

Cult Japanese director Shozin Fukui’s Rubber’s Lover (1996) is perhaps the most extreme example of underground Japanese cyberpunk filmmaking, featuring all kinds of violent and psychosexual depravity. Largely unknown outside of Tokyo’s underground art-cinema sphere for many years, it has since been made available to wider, foreign audiences courtesy of US based, specialist and rarities distributor Unearthed Films.

Beneath an industrial compound, a clandestine group of scientists are researching the possibilities of triggering and developing psychic powers within human subjects, with a combination of ether and an experimental practice called D.D.D (Direct Digital Drive) involving computer interfaces and sensory deprivation. The project so far has been unsuccessful with all their test subjects – homeless people pulled from the street – dying gruesomely as a result of the experiments. Appalled by the team’s failure and sloppy work ethic, the project’s benefactor cuts their funding and sends his secretary Kiku (Nao) to oversee the shutdown.

Convinced that they are close to a breakthrough, scientists Motomiya (Sosuke Saito) and Hitotsubashi (Norimizu Ameya) take Kiku hostage and decide to conduct one last psychic experiment on their fellow colleague Shimika (Yôta Kawase), who has become addicted to ether thanks to Motomiya. The results are astounding, as psychic powers awaken in Shimika with devastating consequences…


Seen as a loose prequel to his first feature film 964 Pinnochio (1991), Fukui’s Rubber’s Lover, along with its predecessor, is frequently compared to the work of Japanese cyberpunk overlord Shinya Tsukamoto and his Tetsuo movies. And while Rubber’s Lover shares a similar industrial aesthetic and spirituality to Tetsuo – the creation of a new world order through technologically altered symbiosis; immeasurable psychic power and the fusion of flesh and metal respectively – Fukui’s style is divergent enough for his work to be more than merely copying what’s gone before, and offers an unnerving, brutal and claustrophobic experience unlike anything you’ve experienced before.

For a start, while Rubber’s Lover is atmospherically intense, its pacing for the most part is eerily subdued and curiously detached. Choosing not to imitate Tsukamoto’s innovative, hand-held camerawork and lightning quick cuts, Fukui favours interestingly framed, locked off shots with some scenes being covered in their entirety from a single angle. This approach allows events to unfurl organically, and feels more absorbing than other Japanese cyberpunk offerings that usually forego this in favour of a barraging, hyperkinetic, sensory assault. It’s all the more interesting considering that his first feature, 964 Pinocchio, was one such assault, lending this effort a more confident, yet still crazy and borderline unfathomable execution.

Rubber’s Lover is still all about visuals and atmosphere, as the film’s relatively meagre plot, although more full-bodied than Fukui’s previous feature, is frequently put to one side to make room for its more avant-garde pretensions. Fukui coaxes some emotively primal performances from his small cast, which could be misinterpreted as being merely amateurish. The results are mixed: female characters come across as being emotionally vacant; Nao’s Kiku seems strangely aloof, even when she’s being raped; and Mika Kunihiro’s PVC clad nurse Akari appears desensitised to all that she sees - unfazed even when witnessing a test subject explode in a shower of black pus due to an ether overdose.

On the other hand, the male performances are wild, hammed up and overly hysterical. Hitotsubashi deteriorates into a squealing, nervous wreck whilst Motomiya is content to experience a fair chunk of the ensuing mayhem in nothing but his pants. Shimika’s mental breakdown seems most justified; he is after all continually fighting to control his newfound powers, as well as his ether addiction. However, this collective decent into madness compliments the film’s overall tone, as does the frequent screaming and writhing, which, though unwelcome, feels strangely necessary considering the subject matter.

As indicated by the film’s title, there is a strange inclusion of S&M and fetishist imagery further perverted by bolted on makeshift, scientific hardware. The suit that Shimika is forced to wear for the experiment – a black rubber outfit with a variety of consoles, wires and other gismos attached – is particularly iconic, and not only echoes the BDSM antics hinted in Tsukamoto’s Testuo: The Iron Man (although its much more obvious here), but the deranged and secretive wartime experiments performed by the Japanese military on Chinese POWs in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Akari’s oversized, rotating ether injector is incredibly phallic, especially when it’s used rectally for “instant effect,” and extends the notion of perversion past the usual touchstones of sex and violence and into the realms of science and technology.

The film is shot in grainy yet beautiful black-and-white, giving the starkly lit, underground locations a haunting, industrial nightmare quality that can only be realised in lo-fi monochrome. The choice to do this stemmed from the director’s dislike of the rubber suit when it appeared on colour film stock. It’s a decision that works in the film’s favour, giving the ridiculous S&M paraphernalia, out-dated laboratory equipment, and the huge, thrown together D.D.D contraption an air of surreal believability - and undeniable menace. It also helps mask the limitations of the film’s many gory practical effects, which require a strong stomach for the most part.

Although seldom used, the film’s use of music is particularly effective, lending further eeriness to an already unsettling piece of filmmaking, stressing its allegiance to niche audience appeal. In keeping with the film’s ethos – “psychic power is realised when mental anguish exceeds physical pain” – the violence is staggering, and certainly not for the faint of heart. Fukui’s decision to use black coloured blood only makes the proceedings appear even more macabre, as evidenced in a surreal sex scene where a bloodied character starts tearing the flesh off his partner with his bare hands, while a corporate executive laughs maniacally in the corner.


Best viewed on a small screen in a room solely lit by the shimmering glow of a CRT monitor, Rubber’s Lover is a unique and seriously twisted, nightmarish trip of a film that’s a testament to what can be achieved with little resources. Its violent and experimental nature will scare off all but the sturdiest of cinephiles – those intrigued by Tetsuo will find much to enjoy here, although it lacks the thematic depth and sledgehammer immediacy of that piece. Nevertheless, Rubber’s Lover is Japanese cinema at its most hardcore. MP