Incomplete Chairs had its world première at Slash Film Festival 2025, 24th Sept
Kenichi Ugana’s Incomplete Chairs is, among other things, a peculiar character study. Intense, uptight, arrogant and odd, with the top button of his shirt always closed, protagonist Shinsuke Kujo (Ryu Ichinose) is an up-and-coming ‘chair artist’ whose designs are displayed on his slick website, drawing the attention and admiration of chair makers, chairs sellers, chair buyers and chair fans from all over Tokyo. And whenever any of these visit his ‘studio’ – in fact just a high-rise apartment whose walls and floor are ominously covered in plastic sheeting – Shinsuke poses his guests the question, “If there’s a ten-thousand yen chair and a one-million yen chair, which one would you sit on?”, and then murders them in cold blood, chopping up their bodies into parts for later use. He is a cold fish, and a psychopath, who is not really even particularly interested in chairs, but rather sees them as the means to his real end, which is semi-rationalised – if not at all rational – serial killing.
Natsuko Kato (Ryoka Oshima), a buyer for the company Complete Chairs, can see that the chairs on Shinsuke’s site are somewhat derivative, but recognises Shinsuke’s “craftsman’s pride”, and believes that he “will create something remarkable one day”, even if she tells him over a drink, “You mix the best of others instead of focusing on your own individuality.” Although she does not know it, her words are true on more than one level. For the chair that he is currently making is constructed from the limbs and bones and skin of his victims – precisely mixing “the best of others”. His chair is to be a mad reconstitution of bodies, much like the human furniture decorating the killer family’s home in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), or the corpse-walled abode in Lars von Trier’s The House that Jack Built (2018), or even the fleshy horse-god statue in Teruo Ishii’s Horrors of Malformed Men (1969) – a film which, at least in its early scenes, draws on Edogawa Ranpo’s significantly titled story The Human Chair (1925).
Yet here the chair is incomplete, as Shinsuke, less skilled than his public image would suggest, struggles with the material impracticalities of bringing about his bizarre vision. “I’ve realised that imagination and reality are different,” he tells Natsuko, “I seek perfection, but it’s difficult to manifest my ideals within reality.” Even if these two speak at cross purposes, their conversation is a discourse on the creative process which might apply equally to any artistic enterprise, be it chair design, pattern killing, or even filmmaking, all three of which will come to partial fruition at the end of Incomplete Chairs – although there is always more work to do.
Ugana’s film, co-written with Suisui Fukaido, is hard to pin down and piece together. For while it is certainly in part about its own messy making, it is also, all at once: a tale of indignant, widely targeted revenge (possibly by proxy) against industrial abuse; a critique of capitalism, branding and exclusivity; a satire of online manipulation and imposture, and of public and even professional ignorance, all revealing a broader human idiocy; an exposé of the way groups prefer to close ranks than to confront improper conduct within; and an absurdist story – not unlike Quentin Dupieux’s Deerskin (2019) – of monomaniacal, murderously fetishised obsession.
“If he’s allowed to run loose, it’ll be a huge blow to the chair industry,” declares Natsuko’s friend Masaki Uchida (Akito Fujii) of Shinsuke’s murderous rampage. It is just one of many crazy lines in this crazy film, suggesting that as Shinsuke – in the end as at the beginning – merges with the crowd in the Tokyo streets, he may not be alone in his madness. And as for the perfection that Shinsuke seeks – well let’s just say that his work remains makeshift and, although brand new, already a little the worse for wear. Ugana’s, though, is funny, freaky and fucked up.
strap: Kenichi Ugana’s tale of seats, psychosis and serial killing shows the mad, emptily obsessive perfectionism of any artistry
© Anton Bitel
