For the want of a better way to describe this repugnant revolting piece of hedonistic art, I’d say “The Forest Of Love” is a monstrous epic. Those familiar with the director’s deranged filthy overview of suburban life the inexcusable excesses of “The Forest Of Love” come as no shock. For the uninitiated, this film is enough to put you off Japanese cinema for at least five years. Not to mention the serial-killer genre for a lifetime.
“The Forest Of Love” is a demented savage story of a suave and swarmy (yes, characters in a Sion Sono film can be both simultaneously) serial killer Joe Murata (Kippei Shina) who charms his way into a well-to-do respectful Japanese household where the patriarch is so obsessed with propriety that he urges the speeding ambulance to silence its siren as it arrives home after his daughter tries to commit suicide.
Into this repressed home comes Murata seducing and fornicating his way through every woman in the household from the mother to the youngest daughter. Murata”s main focus of savage seduction is the elder daughter Mutsuko (Kamataki Eri) who will later collude with the psychotic seducer and his chief accomplice, a film buff named Shin (Mitsushima Shinnosuke) who plays the role of a brutal catalyst in this dreadful drama of unbearable violence and savagery.