Door (1988)
7/10
Doa ni oto shinaide kudasai
30 September 2023
Warning: Spoilers
Yasuko (Keiko Takahashi) is alone. The kind of alone where even though she has a husband and a son, she's alone. Longingly alone. Trapped at home all day, unless she's running errands. She lives for her family and the only people that she often interacts with are the constant sales calls and salesmen knocking at her door. Some of them are pretty determined. Not all of them are as deranged as Yamakawa (Daijirô Tsutsumi).

He wants to sell her English lessons and she's made a mistake by leaving the door just chained and not locked. His invasion of her high rise apartment is dealt with by slamming the door, injuring his hand. That's not where things end.

Yamakawa -- like many of the salesmen -- knows way too much about his marks. Now, he starts calling Yasuko constantly, breathing heavy, leaving obscenity-laced messages and even leaving tissues stained with his bodily fluids in her mailbox. He nearly gets into her bedroom before her son comes home from school. Yamakawa is innocent now, joining mother and son for a friendly dinner, an invader smiling at the table.

Director Banmei Takahashi, who co-wrote Door with Ataru Oikawa, has a career filled with movies that infuse sex and violence. Incredibly, Keiko Takahashi is his wife and he puts her through hell here, but in the final moments of the movie, she rises above, literal chainsaw in hand, and pays her attacker back. She never apologized for breaking his hand and she's not about to apologize now.

This was followed by two sequels, Door II: Tokyo Diary about a call girl and the risks she takes, and Door III, in which a salesgirl is "stalked by the strange and supernatural," which means that now I need to hunt down both of those movies.

Man, the sound of that doorbell is making me nervous now.
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