A four-hour telluric eruption that fuses Shakespearean farce with liberation theology, exploitation cinema with Dostoevsky, and romantic comedy with an amphetamine overdose. That, perhaps, is one way to begin scratching the monolithic surface of "Love Exposure". Sion Sono’s monster-work is not a film to be watched, but an ordeal to be endured, a pagan sacrament that asks of the viewer an act of faith and physical resistance, promising in return a twisted and excruciating form of cinematic ecstasy. In an era of compressed narratives and atomized consumption, a 237-minute epic on perversion as a path to salvation is an act of cultural terrorism, a magnificent and shameless middle finger raised to sobriety and good taste.

At the center of this narrative vortex is Yu, the son of a pious Catholic priest (a Tetsu, played by Atsuro Watabe, whose faith has curdled into oppressive fanaticism since his wife’s death). Pressured by his father's demands to confess increasingly grave sins, and having none to offer, the young Yu embarks on a path of methodical transgression. Sin becomes a filial duty, an inverted asceticism. And what sin is more emblematic in Japanese society than tōsatsu, the perverse art of upskirt photography? Yu doesn't merely practice it: he elevates it to an Olympic discipline, a form of existential parkour, becoming a legend in the pervert underworld. His body becomes an acrobatic feat, his camera an extension of his desperate search for a stain to atone for. It is here that Sono achieves his first, brilliant short-circuit: Yu's perversion is not rooted in lust, but in a distorted filial love and a desperate need for grace. He is a sinner by obedience, a saint in reverse.

His path inevitably crosses that of his "Mary," his epiphany. Yoko, a rebellious girl who viscerally hates men and perversion, appears to Yu in the middle of a colossal brawl, a ballet of punk-rock violence. In the split second she delivers a flying kick, Yu captures the fleeting moment and, with it, his destiny. He falls hopelessly in love. The problem, of course, is that Yoko is the incarnation of everything that would condemn him. How can a master of tōsatsu win the heart of an iconoclastic misandrist? The solution, worthy of As You Like It or Twelfth Night, is cross-dressing. Yu transforms into "Sasori" (Miss Scorpion), an improbable heroine in women's clothing who becomes Yoko's best friend and confidante. The plot, already Rabelaisian in its own right, is complicated further when their respective widowed parents fall in love, turning the two protagonists into step-siblings.

If the first half of the film is a hypertrophic and surreal comedy of errors, a brilliant analysis of gender identity, performance, and the fetishistic nature of love, the second half plummets into an abyss of psychological darkness. Enter the "Zero Church" cult, a sect clearly inspired by Aum Shinrikyō (the cult responsible for the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway), led by the mellifluous and terrifying Koike. The sect offers an alternative form of "family" and "salvation," but its true purpose is the total deconstruction of individual identity, the erasure of memory and free will. The Zero Church and Yu's father's Catholic Church are but two sides of the same dogmatic coin: both demand total confession, a nullification of the self in the name of a higher authority. Sono stages a sharp critique of the power structures—religious, familial, social—that seek to harness and define the individual.

It is here that "Love Exposure" transcends satire to become an almost unbearable drama about the resilience of the human psyche. The brainwashing sequences Yoko is subjected to are brutal, an almost clinical exploration of the fragility of memory and love. The cult's mantra, which forces her to repeat that the penis is the incarnation of evil and that Yu is an enemy, is the ultimate perversion: not a sexual one, but an epistemological one, the destruction of an individual's ability to know and recognize their own truth. And Yu's struggle to save her becomes an almost Christological crusade, a path of physical suffering and humiliation that leads him to touch the very bottom of depravity just to reach his beloved. His desperate cry of "Yoko!", repeated to the point of exhaustion, becomes a litany, the only prayer left in a world devoid of God, but not of faith.

Sion Sono directs this incandescent material with an energy that borders on the miraculous. His direction is a sensory assault. He shifts from sequences shot with the frenzy of a documentary to moments of pure visual poetry, all punctuated by the ironic and hammering use of Ravel's "Boléro," which accompanies Yu’s photographic "performances," transforming them into an almost sacred ritual. The film, originally six hours long and vaguely based on the story of a friend of the director's who ended up in a cult, retains a sense of urgency and excess that is its stylistic and thematic signature. It is a maximalist film in an age of minimalism, a work that overflows with ideas, characters, subplots, and genres. It could be compared to the iconoclastic fury of the Japanese New Wave of Nagisa Ōshima, but with an injection of pop culture and otaku humor that makes it uniquely contemporary. In it, you’ll find the obsession of a Werner Herzog protagonist, the chaotic ensemble of a Robert Altman or a Paul Thomas Anderson, and the surreal critique of religion of a Luis Buñuel. And yet, the final result is unmistakably and uniquely Sion Sono.

Ultimately, "Love Exposure" is a film about love as an extreme form of knowledge and resistance. Love is not a gentle and reassuring feeling, but a primordial and violent force, an obsession that forces you to cross-dress, to sin, to fight, to lose yourself only to find yourself again. Yu's "perversion," born as a response to religious dogma, reveals itself to be the only authentic compass in a world of false faiths and imposed identities. His gaze through the lens, initially profane, becomes the only one capable of seeing Yoko's true essence, his "Mary." It is a film that advances the radical thesis that salvation is not found in the heavens or in pure doctrines, but down below, in the body, in desire, even in the filth of sin. A monumental, exhausting, imperfect, and absolutely essential work, that does not ask to be understood, but to be experienced. An act of cinematic love so total and insane that it becomes, in itself, a form of perversion. And of grace.