‘Safe Word’: An Erotic Pseudo-Documentary From A Found Footage Master [Unnamed Footage Festival 2023]
Mary Beth McAndrews
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Japanese director Koji Shiraishi is known for his strange and terrifying work within the found footage subgenre. From his masterpiece Noroi: The Curse to his more recent works like A Record of Sweet Murder, Shiraishi has a taste for cosmic horror from a first-person perspective. But now, Shiraishi is deviating from his normally scheduled programming to deliver a piece of queer, sex-positive found footage about embracing sexuality and living without shame. His new film Safe Word is a pseudo-documentary about BDSM, kink, and falling in love.
Safe Word is a Japanese pink film, which is essentially soft-core porn. Oftentimes they have lower budgets and lean into sexual themes without showing genitals or explicit and unsimulated sex. Safe Word specifically is part of the Roman Porno series. This series is the work of the famous Japanese studio Nikkatsu, which has been producing pink films for 50 years. Shiraishi’s take is unapologetically queer and silly, reveling in sexuality but never taking it too seriously.
The film follows Misa the Killer (Kawase Chisako), a pro-wrestler and underground pop star who goes against the cutesy grain of most Japanese idols. A documentarian is following her to tell Misa’s story and captures when the owner of a high-class BDSM club offers Misa a job. After watching Misa start a brawl in a small club, the owner believes she’d make an incredible dominatrix. Thus begin’s Misa’s training underneath (both literally and figuratively) seasoned dominatrix Kanon (Torinomi Nagisa). While training, Misa learns to embrace being a pervert and discovers the beauty of sapphic love the more time she spends with Kanon.
Misa’s journey is overall light-hearted with important and serious implications about what it means to embrace your true desires. She meets a famous celebrity who loves being a pervert, publically claiming it with no shame while other high-powered men she meets revel in being ridiculed. And while she herself leans into the power of being a dominatrix, she also finds power in letting herself be dominated, specifically by Kanon.
This is a film that could easily become a slew of exploitative images that revel in nude bodies and fake female pleasure to cater to a male gaze. And while we can never truly eliminate the male gaze, Shiraishi does actively work against it in how he frames intimacy. Orgasms aren’t framed as spectacle, but as revelations, moments of freedom from societal expectation. Golden showers are disgusting, but powerful, moments of empowerment rather than pure degradation. Kink isn’t a punchline here, which is utterly refreshing. Shiraishi’s camera respects kink, shows it as an exercise in self-love, and never once tries to remove agency from his characters.
While this is a pseudo-documentary, Shiraishi stretches that label to its limits as the in-world camera elements almost disappear. Yes, there is a woman filming, but you sometimes forget she exists, which defeats the purpose of first-person perspective filmmaking. This won’t bother most, but for those found footage fans with a keen eye for these filmmaking techniques, these instances will no doubt sneak into their brains.
Safe Word may not be a horror movie, but it’s operating within the expected conventions of Japanese exploitation films of the 1970s and 1980s. Shiraishi is well aware of such tropes, working with them himself for previous genre work. With Safe Words, he gets to play in a more light-hearted space, still creating subversive films, just with a less terrifying tone. Shiraishi creates an absolutely lovely film that’s never made golden showers feel so romantic.
Summary
Koji Shiraish’s ‘Safe Word’ is a sex-positive and queer pseudo-documentary that wants us all to embrace our inner pervert.
