Through Sachiko, the mitochondria announces to the shocked world that they have waited 1.4 billion years for this opportunity to live on their own.

When Kiyomi (Hazuki Riona), his wife of only a year, dies in gruesome car accident, Toshiaki in a grief-filled delusion decides to make a culture out her mitochondria in an effort to keep “her” alive.īut to his surprise, the culture multiplies exponentially, turning into a computer-graphics-assisted golden goo that first possesses his assistant Sachiko ( Nakajima Tomoko) and then metamorphizes into the seductive figure of his departed wife. Nagashima Toshiaki ( Mikami Hiroshi) is a biologist performing experiments on mitochondria, the human cellular organelles that, due to a different DNA structure, are like parasites that have entered into a symbiotic relationship with our bodies. The Frankenstein analogy is appropriate, because Parasite Eve, based on Sena Hideaki’s best-selling horror/science fiction novel, does feature an experiment with life that has gone wrong. It s the first film I’ve seen in a long time that dares to have a character mutter in time with claps of thunder–in a variation of the old Baron–“She’s still alive!” without expecting the audience to burst out in laughter. Maybe that’s the only way they can get numbed viewers to look up from their dinner.īy contrast, the dominant style in contemporary Japanese cinema is still subtle understatement–that is, until Parasite Eve came along. In that world of hammed excess, where flashy but cheap visuals have to make up for bad scriptwriting and plots are so reduced to convention that only absurdity breeds interest in the narrative, it seems that dialogue is often accompanied by lightning. The thunder emphasis became such a cliche that Mel Brooks and Count Floyd on SCTV parodied it, and now no one in their right mind would use it seriously. Without fail, it was a trick that would appear in all the old Frankenstein horror flicks: Baron von Frankenstein would tower over the monster in his lab, scream out “He’s alive!” and at that moment, thunder would crash and lightning flash. Ochiai’s ‘Parasite’ Feeds on Television Cliches

Parasite eve ending