Kenichi Ugana is a singular figure in cinema right now. He is a fast-rising star of cult and genre cinema, both in his native Japan and internationally, with his films being selected for prestigious festivals, such as the Toronto International Film Festival in 2024 (for context, at the same festival, seven of the ten Best Picture Nominees also played there that year). He is also incredibly prolific, with three films out this year alone, all of which are playing festivals around the world simultaneously. Yet at the same time, he does not have a Wikipedia page, and almost none of his films are available to watch in the UK.
His latest film, Incomplete chairs, premiered at Grimmfest here in Manchester, and I got the chance to interview him. Before meeting him, I reached out to Ugana, and he kindly sent me copies of some of his most popular films, allowing me to become more immersed in his work during the week leading up to our conversation.
The uniting quality of the films I watched was that I would call them all, to varying degrees, bizarre. His film Extraneous matter is a sort of riff on E.T, if the titular alien was a slightly grotesque octopus creature and there was an added eroticism. Visitors (complete edition), is a completely bonkers sixty minutes that plays out with zombie-like demons coming to Japan, initially portraying itself as a classic survival horror à la The evil dead, and by the end, evolving into an almost slice-of-life film about how these demons are living their life in rural Japan, including one who is seen using his chainsaw arms to till the farming land.
His most acclaimed work to this point is The Gesuidouz, the film of his that played at TIFF last year. This is the most conventional Ugana film I’ve seen thus far, following a horror-themed punk rock group as they go out to the country to try and record a hit song. Whilst The Gesuidouz has less of the over-the-top bloodiness of Ugana’s other films, it retains his off-the-wall strangeness and punk/DIY energy. If it ever becomes available in the UK, I highly recommend seeking it out.
Whilst watching all of these certainly helped contextualise Ugana as a filmmaker, Incomplete chairs pulls in a different direction to the prevailing goofiness (and I mean goofiness very positively) of his other films.
It follows a furniture designer who is obsessively trying to craft a new, perfect chair, going about his artistic pursuits in murderous ways. The film, I would argue, still displays absurdist tendencies, but portrays it in a far more clinical form than Ugana’s previous works. The violence, while still over the top, is more chilling, and the overall direction feels more sparse.
I started by asking him where the idea for the film came from. “At first, the producer said, you have to shoot a gore movie and don’t care about your rating, so I said, okay, I will try.” Ugana tells me, “I made it because I think recently social media has become too extreme. Sometimes it hides violence, and sometimes there is too much violence. It is too much for me and I wanted to explore it.”
It is an answer I was admittedly surprised to hear. The film features a lot of dialogue about social media, and it is used as a plot device at times, but my overall reading of the film was far more centred on the insanity of the artistic process. Ugana, while receptive to this reading, was steadfast in his focus on social media as the film’s main theme. The idea of making a film about a murderous chair maker in order to dig into social media is certainly not an obvious one, but it is representative of Ugana’s out-of-the-box approach.
He then told me about where the chair idea came from. “Of course, I had a lot of options [for what the character could be making]. At first it was suits, jackets, but I think it is not strange enough. I wanted more crazy things, so yes, I chose chairs.”
The film has been compared to American psycho and the works by author Ryu Murakami, so I asked Ugana about his influences for the film. He tells me he doesn’t so much have influences he pulls from for specific films, instead talking in the scope of his entire filmography. “For all my films, it’s David Cronenberg. It’s not a direct influence, but I love his films so much they can’t help but influence me.”
While Cronenberg is perhaps a clear choice for any horror filmmaker, it is far from the only place Ugana’s films draw inspiration from. He has in the past spoken about his childhood love of renting anime, his mother being a huge horror fan, and admiration for the French New Wave that came from his father, all being areas that influence his work.
Focusing more on the film in the context of the other films of his I had been watching, I asked about the film having a more serious, clinical tone and style compared to his wackier previous efforts. “I wanted to challenge myself a little,” he tells me, but ultimately, he can’t help but want to lean back into the more comic elements. “Of course, here I wanted to show the serious side of things, but I think that horror scenes in the end always become a little comic, because it is so unreal.”
Even the more straight-laced elements can end up comedic for Ugana – “Every character is so serious that sometimes the comedy comes and I love that.” This certainly rings true of the film. There are many scenes that lean into more tense filmmaking and incredibly serious dialogue delivery, but Ugana’s tendency for absurdity and heightening of every situation makes even the more chilling moments have that black comic edge to them.
We eventually move on to discussing his process a bit more. I ask him how he works so quickly, this being his third film releasing in 2025 alone. He earnestly says, “I don’t know” and laughs. “I think I just want to shoot films all the time.”
“Just recently, last December, I shot The curse, a Japanese-Taiwanese co-production, and then in January I shot another film that is not announced yet, and then in February I shot Incomplete chairs. So then, in the Spring I was editing those three feature films. Then in the summer season I wrote a script for some films in the future and now I am visiting a lot of the film festivals. So yeah, that’s my schedule for the year.”
The way he delivers this schedule to me is with such excitement, there is no hint that this is too much for him. It is an incredibly impressive work-load, especially with the end products turning out so well. I was genuinely shocked to hear about it, which just made Ugana laugh.
“For the first years trying to direct I was never given the opportunity to,” he tells me. “So now if I receive chances to direct I will take them. You never know when you might die and there are so many things I want to make.” While it is a slightly morbid answer, it shows the depths of Ugana’s passion for filmmaking and how grateful he is to be able to make films.
I ask him if he does have any plans to slow down, again he laughs, and says, “Maybe after next year.” We will have to wait and see.
