The Virgin Psychics (2016) - Sion Sono

The latest film from the twisted mind of the prolific, outside-the-box Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono, The Virgin Psychics is a madcap teenage sex romp that defies typical genre classifications, being a bombastic film about a virgin, horny teenage boy who wishes to save the world and find the girl of his dreams, after awakening one morning to discover he has psychic powers.  With elements of the teenage sex comedy, the common fairy tale, and superhero blockbusters, Sion Sono's The Virgin Psychics is a kinetic, unruly sex romp that is unabashedly filthy in this two hour story full of Japanese schoolgirl fetishism and penis jokes, being told entirely through the eyes of a teenage boys gaze.  Like most of Sono's films, the narrative of The Virgin Psychics is unruly and manic by traditional standards, but the filmmaker manages to keep this outlandish teenage sexy comedy fairytale relatively coherent, delivering a film that for better or worse, exhibits the mindset and psyche of teenage sexual awakening, giving sex an almost supernatural quality - presenting sex as a yet unattained thing which mystifies our young protagonist.  For a film so enamored with exhibiting a teenage boy's budding sexuality through an absurdest and hyper-exaggerated lens, The Virgin Psychics is a film that remains surprisingly sweet, with Sono's film exhibiting a surprisingly tender film about sexuality in the end that certainly laughs at the absurdity of sex while providing a fairy tale type ending and coming age defining moment about a young man coming to better understand sexuality.  Full of Sion Sono's unique, lavish excesses of style and absurdity, The Virgin Psychics confronts the sexual taboos of budding teenage sexuality with a lot of style and a lot of laughs, delivering another one-of-a-kind teenage sex comedy? that is both coming of age story and superhero quest, a film which truly defies any strict genre classification.  

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