The blood that comes out of, and covers, Izo Okada (Nagato Hiroyuki) reaches its peak about two minutes into his story, when the samurai is crucified and repeatedly lanced until dead. The time is pre-Meiji Japan, where Izo, an actual historical figure, used his talent for killing ostensibly to help revolutionaries overthrow the reactionary Shogunate rulers of Japan. But in history, as in life, and especially in the cinema of Miike Takashi, things are not as cut and dry as that. In Izo, Miike’s part acid-folktale, part polemic action film scripted by Takechi Shigenori, the bloodthirsty samurai does not die on the cross but rather escapes death, transcends time, and rampages through Japanese history killing all he sees on his path to punish those who sin through deceit.

Miike is not one for coherence, consistency, or clarity but he is one for follow-through, and perhaps that is what makes Izo compelling and near masterful. It is Miike’s most pretentious and ambitious film yet, a move signaled by the film’s shock cut from Izo’s crucifixion to a montage of newsreel archive footage that initially looks like a history narrative on fast-forward but gradually reveals itself to be mostly footage of Japan before, during, and after World War II (as well as, importantly, images from the West). This may seem bizarre when followed by the opening scenes depicting Izo running into, and promptly killing, the ghosts of a dead opponent and a jilted lover, for at first it seems his quest for vengeance has a personal note to it. But the scale is upped as Izo slaughters a series of Buddhist clergymen, and a worried cabal of Japanese rulers (who seem to exist in no specific period in history), including Kitano Takeshi as Prime Minister and Matsuda Ryuhei as a pensive Emperor/Buddha, wonder at how their totalitarian regime could not keep such an “irrational” element as Izo in line with society.

As the film spans decades, implicating primarily wartime Japan, Meiji Japan, and postwar Japan, and leaving Tokugawa and pre-Shogunate Japan bloody but politically benign, Izo’s existence becomes less a quest and more a senseless narrative. The sword fights come often and are long, frantic, and fairly ordinary, and Miike seems be interested in making Izo’s repetitious existence as tedious for the audience as it is for him. No matter what time he exists in there always seem to be elements of society insulted by or afraid of Izo’s existence as evidence of imperfection in society—1980s businessmen cry to him for mercy, Occupation-era gangsters want him off their turf, contemporary young women press in on him like zombies, and Meiji-era policemen want to arrest him. The only people who seem to understand Izo’s abstract condition—that of an infinite, continued, unending hell of pain and bloodletting with no discernable purpose—are his mother, a wandering demon father figure (the only person in the film capable of cutting Izo down), and the pensive Emperor figure—do little to shed light on Izo’s (or Izo’s) modus operandi. They speak only of his ignorance of his own quest, his soulless/soulfulness, and the irrationality of his existence. A brief flashback shows Izo’s feudal lord recognizing in him his demonesque ability to kill and charges him to do so as a vocation, and the scene is followed by a samurai musing that a perfect system must vomit up the imperfect to remain perfect. Though Izo is thereby identified as the outsider, his vendetta against the system and those who reside in it points to a remaining imperfection that he himself is striving against. (He is later shown to in the garb of the Japanese military being sent to do service during the 15 Year War.) Izo apparently means not to escape existence but rather to end the injustice that allows his existence.

Abstractly and obliquely addressing the legacy of feudalism, loyalty, the Emperor system, honor, and the celebration of violence in Japanese history, Izo provides a postmodern folktale for the Miike generation of historically ignorant, shock-happy cinemagoers. Tacking on his trademarks of bloodletting, orifices, oozing liquids, strange births, and grungy, near straight-to-video aesthetics onto a convoluted, imprecise meditation on brutality in Japanese history seems particularly inspired, as if Miike was hesitantly beginning to look for the roots of the graphic pleasure and subversion in his own work. Izo is certainly self-conscious enough, placing the passionate acoustic folk poems of singer Tomokawa Kazuki literally inside the narrative itself, lamenting, romanticizing, and further abstracting Izo’s existence through in-movie songs. Later, a sword duel suddenly is doctored to look like it is archive footage, an early 20th century cabinet member watches Izo’s progress on his computer screen, and near the film’s climax Tomokawa literally tells Izo what to do next—in a dizzying mobius strip, linked to Izo’s own repetitious existence, the people in the film are aware of a legend being made by the film itself. The dialog between stock footage, historical representations, and Izo’s unending path of death may be ill-defined and inexact, but the magnificent phantasmagoric feel of the film is of a filmmaker and a cinema slowly but surely becoming questioning, and perhaps even enlightened.