October 29: A Horror Film That Has Multiple Beheadings

Tag starts with an entire schoolbus full of girls making fun of Mitsuko (Reina Triendl) for being a dreamer before all of them — like fifty people — are beheaded as Mitsuko stands screaming and covered in blood.

This is not the last time that she will be the only survivor.

She wanders through the woods, avoiding a deadly wind, and meets Aki (Yuki Sakura), Sur (Ami Tomite) and Taeko (Aki Hiraoka). The girls discuss predetermination and how they could all die at any moment. Before they go back to class, Sur shares her hypothesis that fate can be tricked by simply doing something one would never normally do.

Back in class, the teacher pulls out a gigantic weapon when no one is paying attention and kills everyone with Sur and Taeko saving Mitsuko, who is again the only survivor as teachers and the wind kill everyone she knows. Mitsuko wanders into town where a cop recognizes her as someone else, Keiko (Mariko Shinoda). She is taken to her wedding, where Aki is her bridesmaid and encourages her to kill all of the other bridesmaids to save herself from being married to the pigheaded groom inside a coffin before the teachers return and attack again. Aki and Keiko defeat all of them as our heroine runs away from the church.

Keiko, who was once Mitsuko, now becomes Izumi (Erina Mano). She’s trapped in a deadly marathon with Aki, Sur and Taeko as they run from the pig husband, the teachers and the wind. Izumi finds her way into a cave where zombie girls try to kill her, claiming that while she lives, they remain undead. Aki saves her and they travel through several parallel world until she demands that Izumi pulls the cables from her arms, killing her and opening a doorway to where she meets a young and old version of a man who is playing as her in a game called Tag that has Mitsuko, Keiko and Izumi as the characters. More than a century ago, Izumi was a girl he admired. He took her DNA and that of her friends and made clones for his 3D game, which is played by men throughout the world. The final part of his game is that she will make love to him.

She then changes the game and each version of herself through all of the different moments of the film kill themselves all at once. She wakes up in a pure white world.

Sion Sono, who directed and wrote Tag, is wild. Seriously, this never stops and never gets the least normal. For a movie that starts with so many heads being removed, you’d think that was the highest point. It’s not. Somehow Sono made four other movies in 2015 and it was inspired by 2008’s The Chasing World.