With more than 100 films under his belt, it’s fair to call Takashi Miike one of the most iconic Japanese filmmakers of all time. Audition, Ichi the Killer, 13 Assassins, several fascinating anime and video game adaptations, and countless other instant classics make Miike’s filmography fascinating. His newest project is a streaming series with a fascinating pitch.
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Connect is about an urban cryptid who lives a semi-normal life under the name Ha Dong-Soo. One night, Dong-Soo finds himself kidnaped by a pair of organ hunters. After hours of surgery, Dong-Soo’s body heals instantaneously and begins to function without his organs. In his escape, he leaves an eye behind, and it winds up in someone else’s skull. Unfortunately, Dong-Soo occasionally gets flashes of vision through his disembodied eye. As the confidently absurd story unfolds, it becomes clear that Dong-Soo’s eye is in the possession of a dangerous criminal and his visions will be key to solving the case. Dong-Soo is a functional immortal with a spiritual connection to his missing eye. The show is a murder mystery led by a body horror superhero with the director of Yakuza Apocalypse at the helm. That pitch should pretty effectively communicate whether this show will appeal.
Connect is not interested in explaining almost any aspect of its narrative. It’s all told in subtle details and big bold absurd concepts. Dong-Soo, known online as Connect for unknown reasons, gets hacked to bits over and over. Connect is framed like a horror villain more often than not, and his response to trauma is appropriately nightmarish. Instead of just regrowing his severed limbs like Wolverine, Connect’s body extends a mass of tendrils to reattach whatever was most recently cut off. Imagine a version of Deadpool with no sense of humor or combat skills, and you have the hero of this show. It’s as if every cell in his body is a fully sapient organism with the primary goal of staying in one piece. As a protagonist, his brooding disposition could make him feel distant, but there’s a lot of humanity in Connect’s bizarre form. However, the show isn’t just about an immortal trying to make a life for himself, there’s also a murderer on the loose.
The actual driving plot of Connect follows the effort to catch a serial killer. A pair of detectives work hard to get to the bottom of the bizarre murders, but they find themselves coming up empty. The killer uses strange references to spiritual matters, they appear to be obsessed with astrology, and their methods are uniquely monstrous. Since the cops are effectively clueless, most of the actual detective work falls to Connect. Dong-Soo is obliged to solve the case for more than morals since he still wants his eye back. The killer seems broadly unaware that his eye could be a danger to him, but he’s far too wrapped up in murder to consider the possibility. No aspect of the show is free from Miike’s unique vision.
The idea of a spiritual connection between a person and their organs is bizarre enough on its own, but the fact that the character who enjoys that dubious power is a humanoid monster makes it more interesting. Connect does his best to live a normal life, and he can pass without a trace so long as he never gets publicly injured. The show obliquely refers to Connect as a new form of human, like he’s the next stage of evolution for the species. There are so many weird big ideas floating around the series that rarely warrant a second thought. It follows the logic of a dream more than anything else. To really enjoy the show, one must be ready to accept a lot of gore and a ton of logically incongruous concepts. It asks a lot of its audience, but it also drags them along at the speed of sound to countless scenes that they couldn’t find anywhere else.
Connect is a detective show, a supernatural horror series, and a story about a humanoid monster trying to live a normal life wrapped in one. Does it all work together? Not really, but that’s part of what makes it so magical. Connect refuses to explain itself, but it has a ton of fun with its weird concepts. Fans of weird stories will fall in love with Connect. It’s a show that starts strong and only continues to expand as it goes on. Connect is available on Hulu.
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