Dir: Shinya Tsukamoto. Japan. 2002. 80 mins.

Having burst onto the international indie scene in 1989 with Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Shinya Tsukamoto has always been a one-main show, writing, filming, editing and acting his private visions of a nightmare world in which humans have fused to machines, all set to a pounding soundtrack of industrial noise. After becoming a cult sensation, however, Tsukamoto seemed to hit an impasse, recycling the same outrages to ever diminishing effect. But in A Snake of June he has returned triumphantly to form and broken new ground. The film is tipped for festival success and, if it gains a high enough profile, could bring Tsukamoto, if not respectability, then at least the sort of international attention lavished on Shinji Aoyama, Hirokazu Kore'eda and other directors of Japan's New Wave, of which Tsukamoto was the forerunner. In Japan, the film has a distributor, but no firm release date. Overseas, the film makes for more than another midnight movie for cultists. Indeed, it could widen Tsukamoto's appeal to festival and arthouse audiences more interested in character-driven story than campy eccentricity.

For all the extreme violence in his work, Tsukamoto also has a fascination with the erotic, as well as a poetic sensibility that owes as much to the silent screen masters as the punk movement. Though some of the imagery and explosions of violence are familiar - in this feature a mechanical serpent appears as a grotesque torture device - the film's examination of modern sexual dynamics represents a departure, at once comic and disturbing, revealing and enigmatic. And while the film's couple in crisis are less independent entities than expressions of the director's various obsessions, they are more identifiably human than Tsukamoto's earlier robotic creations.

The couple in question are Rinko (Asuka Kurosawa), a counsellor for a telephone crisis service at the county health centre, and Shigehiko, a prosperous, workaholic businessman. Rinko is dedicated to her career and devoted to her husband, though he is balding, stocky and old enough to be her father. They live together in an ultra-modernistic flat that is all angles, shadows and concrete surfaces, with nothing familiarly Japanese. Shigehiko keeps the place sparkling clean - and falls asleep promptly after his labors in a lounge chair.

One day Rinko receives an envelope filled with photographs of her masturbating. Then, she gets a phone call from the photographer. Instead of money, he demands that she wear a micro mini skirt to buy a vibrator. She says she will never comply -- until he tells her she has already been shopping for a vibrator on the Internet. Unsettled and excited, she goes on this unusual shopping expedition - and later learns that the mysterious stranger has been photographing her every move. Not long after, a hospital examination reveals that she is suffering from breast cancer.

When Shigehiko hears about his wife's illness - and discovers her secret sex life - his carefully ordered world is shattered. The stranger, however, is not only a marriage wrecker, but a catalyst for personal revelation and change.

Tsukamoto tells the story of this unusual sexual threesome with evocative, iconographic images in silvery black and white that are at once classic and futuristic. He has evidently been studying his Dreyer and Bresson, and his cinematography conveys all the film's various moods, from dark menace to romantic longing, with an unerring confidence and precision. But rather than allowing the imagery to fall into mere homage, Tsukamoto makes the medium his own, painting on screen a sexually repressed dystopia and achieving a timeless quality that separates him from most of his contemporaries. As such, A Snake of June is a stand-out in a Japanese indie scene that is too obsessed with trends and too often lacking in originality.

The two leads, Asuka Kurosawa and Yuji Kotari, are a physical mismatch but connect well as co-dependents who feed each other's deeper (and stranger) needs. Asuka, with her air of imploding from fear and suppressed sexual desire, brings credibility to what could have been a cliched transition from severe to sensual. Meanwhile the soundtrack, by Chu Ishikawa, provides the techno throb and propulsion expected in a Tsukamototo film, without ever overwhelming the on-screen action.

Though a master of his own cinematic domain, Tsukamoto is unlikely to inspire imitators. But given the enthusiastic reception his latest film is likely to receive, this is one form of flattery he can probably get by without.

Prod co: Kaijyu Theatre
Japan dist: Gold View
Int'l sales: Gold View
Prod: Kiyo Jo
Scr: Tsukamoto
Cinematography: Tsukamoto
Ed: Shinya Tsukamoto
Music: Chu Ishikawa
Main cast: Asuka Kurosawa, Yuji Kotari, Tsukamoto