Movie Review: R100

The kinky comedy R100 is too weird and full of itself to hit cult film status anytime soon.

Review by Matt Cummings

In Writer/Director Hitoshi Matsumoto's R100, the lonely father Takafumi (Nao Ohmori) purchases the services of a BDSM emporium called Bondage, while his wife wastes away in a coma. The gentlemen club's rules are simple: we dominate you wherever and whenever they want for a full year, and there are no cancellations. Ever. Soon, Takafumi is being beat up on city streets, spit on at his home, and tortured with candle wax at the foot of his wife's hospital bed, all while experiencing CGI ripples of pleasure that make his eyes grow black. But the life he paid for soon becomes a nightmare when one of the Dommes is accidentally killed, setting Bondage off to eliminate the client. It soon becomes clear that Takafumi isn't the only one who's caught in a painful spiral, as a group of film critics charged with watching the farcical film try desperately to understand the elderly filmmaker's intentions.

To R100's credit, things certainly aren't dull. There's bizarre and sometimes funny takedowns of Takafumi set to the tune of pop, disco, and even classical music, and an Amazon western Domme (Lindsay Hayward) who wages war on Takafumi before taking him to barn house for a final scolding. But what ultimately kills the film is the constant, lingering scenes of S&M that cross the line to torture without giving back a compelling story. They keep dragging on, punch after kick after spit. By the time it's over, we're as worn out as Takafumi but not in the way a real Domme would like us. It all feels pedestrian, practiced, and hollow, boring us to tears one minute then making us shake our heads as it gets more unpredictable by the minute, only because it has nowhere else to go.

And while it's all for fun (supposedly), the truth of it all is that R100 is just a poor film. None of the character's intentions are ever explored, leaving Takafumi as one-note as the hired help. We gain nothing from going on this journey with him or the film critics who begin to question every part of the film before being led back in to the theater to watch another reel. Moreover, weird for weird's sake is not a journey worth taking unless there's something for the audience to latch on. There's at least three good stories here that were worth telling, but its Frankenstein-ed nature tells none of them well.

R100 will probably play well with D/s couples looking for some comedy to their kink, but it's highly unlikely anyone sans a few cinephiles will embrace it, at least right away. As the mysterious curtain that is BDSM gets slowly pulled back for mainstream mommies to contemplate, films like R100 might eventually find itself elevated to cult film status, a candidate for college classes and the moment when historians will remember when the lifestyle became more accessible. Yeah, and I might meet a Domme in the street who will kick my butt while I pay her to do so. Forget the dream: this one is just awful.

R100 is Unrated and has a runtime of 99 minutes.

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