The Happiness of the Katakuris

Infobox Film
name = The Happiness of the Katakuris


caption = Region 1 DVD cover
director = Takashi Miike
producer = Hirotsugu Yoshida
writer = Kikumi Yamagishi
starring = Kenji Sawada
Keiko Matsuzaka
Shinji Takeda
Naomi Nishida
Kiyoshiro Imawano
Tetsuro Tamba
distributor = Vitagraph Films LLC (US)
released = February 23, 2002 (Japan)
May 16, 2003 (UK)
runtime = 113 min.
country = Japan
language = Japanese
amg_id = 1:261967
imdb_id = 0304262Nihongo|"The Happiness of the Katakuris"|カタクリ家の幸福|Katakuri-ke no kōfuku is a 2001 film directed by Takashi Miike, with screenplay by Kikumi Yamagishi. It is loosely based on the South Korean film "The Quiet Family". The film is a surreal horror-comedy in the farce tradition, which includes claymation sequences, musical and dance numbers, a karaoke-style sing-along scene, dream sequences and Hitchcockian symbolism.

The film won a Special Jury Prize for its director at the 2004 Gérardmer Film Festival.

Plot

The Katakuris are a four-generation family of failures (grandfather, father and mother, children and granddaughter, who narrates the film) who use the father's redundancy pay to buy a guest house in the country. Somehow, each of their guests ends up dead— by suicide, accident or murder— and once they have made the decision to save their business by burying the bodies and concealing the deaths, they find themselves sucked into a nightmare of lies and fear (not helped by the arrival of the daughter's con-man boyfriend, an escaped murderer with police in hot pursuit, and an erupting volcano).

Cast

External links

*imdb title|0304262
* [http://www.duallens.com/index.asp?reviewId=50704 "The Happiness of the Katakuris"] — review for "Dual Lens" by Davin Lagerroos
* [http://www.seekjapan.jp/article-1/765/J-Horror:+An+Alternative+Guide "J-Horror: An Alternate Guide"] — review for "Japanzine" by Zack Davisson
*cite web |url=http://www.jmdb.ne.jp/2002/dz000480.htm|title=カタクリ家の幸福 ("Katakuri-ke no kōfuku")|accessdate=2007-07-21|language=Japanese|publisher=Japanese Movie Database