Perhaps the strangest love story you will ever see, Sion Sono's utterly mad Love Exposure is a four-hour beautiful mess of a movie.

Yū Honda (Takahiro Nishijima) becomes obsessed with sin after the death of devoutly Catholic mother and his father's subsequent induction into the priesthood. After his father's demands that he confess his sins become extreme, Yū falls in with a crowd of petty criminals and eventually becomes the acknowledged king of the furtive art of upskirt photography. One day, when dressed as a woman (this is explained), he meets Yōko (Hikari Mitsushima), a teenage girl who is surrounded by a gang of thugs. After the helps her deal with them she falls in love with his female persona 'Miss Scorpion'.

Then it gets strange.

Featuring deranged violence, more erections than a Giger landscape, genital mutilation, hints of incest, paedophilia, Love Exposure delivers this with such a sense of hyper-real and hysterical melodrama that you begin to take the story seriously, as deranged and cartoonish as it is, and begin to root for the central couple.

I've not been overly taken with Sono's work before. Cold Fish left me rather bored, and Suicide Club was interesting but a little bitty. There is not a boring second here, which is some feat in a four-hour film. It's not always completely coherent but when the result is so entertaining it is hard to care about that.

The standout for me though is Aya Koike (Sakura Ando), a completely demented female Iago with her own designs on Yū. She effortlessly owns every scene she is in. At once attractive and repellent, she's a giggling psychopath with a masochistic streak. She's manipulative and clever, and unbelievably damaged. That she retains a sympathetic side is really impressive.

A twisted take on just exactly what religion can do to a young person's brain when it comes to relationships, Love Exposure is highly recommended for anyone with any interest in East Asian cinema at all.