To be honest, I thought this movie would be a Japanese drama. I was dead wrong. This movie is based of the popular Japanese anime novel of the same name. It tells the story of a town that is cursed by the Uzumaki or The Spiral in English. Little by little the towns residents start to slowly become dangerously and violently obsessed with anything to do with spirals and some of the residents start to actually turn into living things the actually have some sort of spiral within them such as a snail.
The movie was one giant, random, acid trip twisted with romance and drama. Sort of like a
twisted
drama. What makes this movie disturbing is the ways that some of the people are obsessed with The Spiral. For example: one of the dads has a garage full of house hold objects with spirals incorporated into them, one girl took her extremely long hair and teased to an insanely huge spiral-like style, one kid slowly transformed into a human snail, one man could twist his body into a spiral shape, one woman attempted to cut her ear open to obtain the cochlea inside and one teen ran over himself so that he could be twisted around a car tire and one kid stuffed himself into a washer so he could become a spiral.
Another very disturbing aspect of this very well syndicated is the atmospheric tone and the style in which this movie was shot. The camera angles add to the psychotic and twisted story, in other words, a very good cinematography. The overall coloring of this picture makes for a somewhat demented story. The coloring is a blend of lime green, yellow and a little orange and the special effects with some of the spirals are outstanding.
However, like many Japanese films, this one has an undertone of forbidden love and romance between a girl and a boy. However, with all the spirals and strange happening going on in the town it is hard to keep up with the relationship of the two teens. But, in some way it is very irrelevant, more like a second hand story that has nothing to do with the actual story of the spiral obsessed town.
Overall, I would recommend this film to anybody who likes vastly different and bizarre foreign films. It has just enough wackiness and insanity, it touched me.