Shinji Aoyama makes films about extreme emotional dysfunction and dislocation, whose central characters include victims and perpetrators of desperate acts and terrible crimes — sometimes within the same person.
A deeply knowledgeable film scholar, whose tastes run the gamut from Robert Bresson to Toei yakuza pics, Aoyama injects genre elements into his films while rejecting genre cliches and taking a distanced stance.
There is something Kubrickian in this approach — think "Clockwork Orange" comes to Japan — but where Kubrick strove for an immediately identifiable directorial signature, Aoyama varies his style from film to film to reflect the emotional landscapes of his often opaque characters.