Guilty of Romance

[A] sickening, lush mystery about two female corpses, each partly a severed human and partly a mannequin.

Mostly, Guilty of Romance seems content allowing characters to verbally abuse each other before eventually reaching the inevitable conclusion that life is a burden and all love is illusory.

Though it begins with the aesthetic and conceptual rigor of Blade Runner, it quickly veers toward the gratuitous outlandishness of a Bruce La Bruce film.

As bizarrely moralist as it is transgressive.

The whole is about one-quarter as good as Bunuel's Belle de Jour, which its plot vaguely resembles.

One gets the sense the director has become so enamoured the details that he's lost sight of the destination..

Too serious for entertainment yet too bizarre to be taken too seriously, "Guilty of Romance" would be a drag to watch if not for the truly stellar acting by its two eye-catching female leads.

Sion Sono has something of a cult following, however if Guilty of Romance is a viewer's first experience of him, s/he could be forgiven for pondering exactly why this is.

Kagurazaka throws all of herself into her performance. It's the key to selling the outsized emotions and making the over-the-top brutality work to its intended effect.

A cautionary morality play offering a new take on the world's oldest profession.