Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on June 13, 2002, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The “rape-revenge” subgenre has existed as an uneasy relation to the horror genre ever since the early ’80s, when Ebert and Siskel inexorably linked I Spit on Your Grave with that era’s slasher trend. Though the ostensible theme of I Spit and its ilk was female empowerment, most of these movies smacked their lips over the degradation of women just as much as (or even more so than) the worst of the slashers. Cut to the 2000s, and domestic r-r thrillers have been transmogrified and sanitized into the big-screen likes of Enough, while Japan’s Freeze Me emerges as a variation on the subgenre that is no less brutal than but in many ways superior to its American B-movie forebears.
One of the differences between Freeze Me and previous examples is that director Takashi Ishii does not open his film with the rape to both set up the heroine’s vengeance and satisfy the yahoo crowd’s thirst for cheap thrills. We are instead introduced to Chihiro (Harumi Inoue), a young engaged woman going about an apparently normal life until she is accosted at her apartment by a man who appears to be a stranger. It soon comes out that her unwanted visitor is one of a gang who assaulted Chihiro years before, and are now returning, one at a time, for another attack. The men videotaped the rape, and the first to come back blackmails her into continuing her silence by threatening to make the tape public. Only as the film goes on are we given glimpses of her horrific violation, which are hard to watch but also reinforce the terror of her situation. (It has been argued that the Oscar-winning The Accused, by forestalling the presentation of its rape until close to the movie’s end, actually encourages the audience to look forward to it; Ishii manages to avoid that kind of manipulation.)
Eventually, just as both Chihiro and the audience can’t take her mistreatment anymore, she kills the first intruder in a chillingly staged bathroom setpiece. Now that she’s dispatched her tormentor, the question becomes what to do with his body—and that’s where the film’s title becomes relevant. Soon the man’s buddies arrive to assault Chihiro, resulting in more tables-turning and a situation that Alfred Hitchcock might have titled The Trouble With Tom, Dick and Harry.
The last hour of Freeze Me veers into black humor, but Ishii doesn’t make light of the heroine’s situation or psychological state. By presenting a woman who is brutalized but eventually takes revengeful action, he also upends the misogyny of many Japanese thrillers (particularly those of Takashi Miike) in which women are not only subjected to vicious, sometimes sexual tortures but accept them without a word, or an apparent thought that what’s happening to them is wrong. Chihiro (very well-played by Inoue, an empathetic and evidently fearless young actress) may endure more abuse from each succeeding visitor, but Ishii downplays the direct brutality of these scenes, sometimes obscuring the violence with foreground objects. (By presenting the flashbacks to the original rape in a more graphic manner, he makes a dramatic point about their relative effect on Chihiro’s psyche.)
When Chihiro strikes back, the scenes are gruesome and viscerally effective, but Ishii is not interested in creating a one-dimensional avenging angel. She may be ridding her life of men who have made it hell, but while there’s a clear heroine and villains here, there are no real winners in this conflict—except perhaps violence itself. To some viewers, Freeze Me’s final outcome may not be as satisfying on an elemental level as that of a more simplistic good-vs.-evil story like Enough, but it certainly feels more dramatically honest.
