Five loosely interlinked dollops of gonzo storytelling is the offer in Survive Style 5+. They are all, to an extent, stories of surviving, and there are five of them, so that more or less explains the title. The + could be a reference to the second half of the movie, when things take a turn tonally. It might not. It’s that kind of film.
After opening credits that are a frantic display of prime colours and might be described as titles genius Saul Bass seeing God on a mescaline binge, director Gen Sekiguchi gets down to business with his five stories, told in the order 1, 2, 4, 5, 3. Number one is a tale of a man trying to kill his unkillable wife. Two is an advertising woman using her life as inspiration for her campaigns – as we meet her she’s having lousy sex with a premature ejaculator, which prompts an idea. Four is space-cadet Tarantino-adjacent tearaways on a crime spree but with sexual tension bubbling in the background. Five is a British hitman arriving in Japan to carry out a job and intimidating everyone he meets. Three is a salaryman taking his family on a night out to see a stage hypnotist.
As time goes on, the stories will invade each other’s territories, though they all take place in recognisably the same universe to start with – a multicoloured, modern gothic vomit of overstuffed Pop art and psychedelia.
Sekiguchi returns to each story repeatedly, picking up exactly where he left off, upping the ante each time. It’s colourful, gory, icky, silly, hyperkinetic, ridiculous, sexually gimpy and designed to extract yuks of both sorts from its intended audience – loaded midnight-movie crowds.
Perhaps understanding that gonzo is the refuge of the scoundrel and that he simply cannot maintain the level of energy and invention he starts off with, Sekiguchi shifts the tone around the halfway mark. Things are still madly vivid but they’ve also gone a bit existentially maudlin. It turns out that these are sad, contemplative and yearning people who want more out of life than they’ve been offered. The advertising exec, for instance, cannot separate life and work at all and gets no respite from seeing everything as an inspiration for a campaign. One of the teen tearaways has a gay crush on a fellow gang member. The salaryman starts behaving like a bird after being hypnotised at the show, and gets stuck that way. Meanwhile, Vinnie Jones – as the hitman – has an existential question for everyone he meets. “What is your function in life?”
This 2004 offering is the only feature-length movie by Sekiguchi (to date, anyway). Apart from a handful of shorts and contributions to anthology movies, he’s spent his life in advertising. His movie has the hallmarks, as if it only had 30 seconds to make its pitch. He goes all in on technique, with distorting lenses and wild angles, a hyper-busy camera, animated overlays, Guy Ritchie-style whoosh edits, split screens, wire work, animatronics. It’s all here.
It is not particularly one for the singling out of individual performances, though Kyôko Koizumi, as advertising executive Yoko, cuts through as the woman who cannot switch off, and Ittoku Kishibe is heroically dedicated as the salaryman who thinks he’s a bird. Vinnie Jones, meanwhile, plays Vinnie Jones, or the cartoon stereotype image of himself he’s constructed for films like this.
Yes, but what’s it all about? Search me, but the acceptance of difference is definitely there. But style overwhelms content – it’s as if Sekiguchi had something he wanted to get off his chest and went ahead and unloaded onto celluloid. And, having done that, went back to making TV adverts.
Survive Style 5+ – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
