Years after she was raped by three men, Chihiro moves away and tries to rebuild her life and nearly succeeds, until one of the three men finds her and the terror starts all over again. Only, this time, Chihiro is a much different person...

Surviving rape should be enough trauma for one lifetime, especially when it's by not one but three assailants. Having put that horror behind you and started your career and found a new love should be enough challenge for one lifetime. But, in Freeze Me as in life, it is not. When one of the three men shows up at Chihiro's after work one day, announcing he's moving in until one of the attackers is released from jail, she nearly goes out of her mind. After the first attacker rapes her repeatedly, then goes to her workplace and abusing her in front of her coworkers, Chihiro does lose it completely. She kills the young man and, in the tortured aftermath of her realization, decides she must hide the body. She buys a restaurant-sized freezer the puts the body inside, telling herself it's only temporary. But there are still two more attackers, and a boyfriend who loves her and wants to understand.

Director Takashi Ishii, who made the powerful and impressive Gonin, gives presents us with a compelling argument for revenge while managing to make a convincing statement of the plight of women in our contemporary society. Obviously, the violence some men visit upon others has a profound place in this film, and lead actor Harumi Inoue does a superb job of conveying the effects these men and their vile actions have upon her. We share her torment and anguish, and better understand her actions for what they are. As a victim of random violence, caused by adults who suffered childhoods of neglect and misguidance, Inoue's actions become completely understandable. And Freeze Me becomes a persuasive condemnation of society's inability to use precautionary methods in cultivating respect, discretion, and honor among its citizens.

Freeze Me is a dark film with a strong message, but that does not mean you should avoid it. Rather, I enthusiastically recommend it for just these reasons.

Chihiro (Harumi Inoue) is an office worker in Tokyo, engaged to be married, trying to forget the horror of her past when, a schoolgirl, she was gang raped by three men. Then, one of those men arrives at her small flat and, in blithely hostile scenes that are all the more disturbing for their initial lack of violence, decides to stay with her until his friends arrive. Too ashamed to ask for help, and frightened to learn that the rapists have made and sold a video of the assault (shown only in brief grainy flashbacks), Chihiro is forced to submit to repeated attacks, until she sees an opportunity to get rid of each of these rapists in turn. Anxiously, she plans how to dispose of their bodies afterwards...

Freezer (aka: Freeze Me) is a devastatingly powerful thriller, and a merciless, shattering drama - that recalls Meir Zarchi's controversial I Spit On Your Grave (1978), and echoes Polanski's hallucinatory Repulsion (1965). The audience feels compelled to care about the female lead here, not simply out of instinct to protect a pretty girl threatened by wicked men, but because Harumi Inoue is such a great young actress, convincing us of the bitter reality of Chihiro's terrifying ordeal and subsequently overwhelming dilemma. She portrays her character's stifling fear of confrontation, yet reveals steely reserves when pushed too far, and there's a keen moral sense about the action she must take to get rid of these cruel men who have invaded her life, again.

This is not a likeable film in the usual sense of screen entertainment, but the efforts of the director and his cast make it an admirable one. Chihiro's cold fury as she bludgeons her victims to death actually seems a just and fair response to their vile, taunting behaviour. There's a kind of off-colour amusement in the fact that the rapists observe the Japanese custom of removing their shoes on entering Chihiro's flat, while they ignore her weak protests - as if she is obliged to let them stay there. Later, after the brutal and protracted killings, Ishii's nasty little drama of vengeance flirts with black comedy, in scenes where the heroine chats amiably to corpses stashed in chest freezer units that she uses as designer furniture tables and sideboards, draining the limited amperage of her flat's electricity supply, and we soon realise that Chihiro has cracked.

Freezer is also a ghost story... Not a conventional one, obviously, but a stylised version where genre elements are presented metaphorically. Chihiro retains vivid memories of the rapists - recognising each of them instantly, when they return to haunt her. That's one of several meanings that Ishii is exploring in this deceptive, complex film...

COMMENTS
I heard a lot of mixed reviews on this, but I decided to give it a try since some people said it was somewhat similar to I Spit On Your Grave. It ended up being decent at best, but I was hoping for more, especially towards the end.

It's basically about this girl that is raped and videotaped by three men. They let her go and she goes on with her life and never speaks of the incident to anyone. Years later her life is going good until the three men return to make a new video, but this time she wont just walk away.

I thought the story wasn't very original, but it had potential of being good. I thought the concept of her freezing the men's dead bodies so they dont rot was interesting. There's not much for gore or anything that would make you cringe your teeth to. It's a predictable film, but it kept my interest and I found the directing and acting to be pretty decent, which is why I decided on a 5-rating.

Just a small little known fact that the woman in the film is a famous Japanese nude model.

OVERALL
A decent movie, but I expected more. Unoriginal plot, but it had potential of being good. Check this if you're a fan of Asian films, but don't expect too much.

Chihiro (Harumi Inoue) is a respected, hardworking, and well liked woman with a good job and plans for marriage to Kojima (Shingo Tsurumi). She’s bright and cheery and the target of her friends’ coveting due to her engagement. Chihiro lives by herself in a modest, but sufficient, apartment, and spends most of her down time either with Kojima or on the phone with him. However, happiness lasts only a few minutes in this deeply depressingly disturbing study of rape and violence. One morning, Chihiro is struck with horror when she sees a familiar face lingering outside her apartment complex. The face belongs to Hirokawa (Kazuki Kitamura). When he makes eye contact with her, memory of her rape (in which he was a major participant) floods into her mind. She tries to run, but he catches her at her room. He stays in her life for weeks, at first costing her only self-respect and some rather serious injuries. Soon, though, his position in her life wrecks her outside life as well: both professional and personal. It begins when one day he storms her office demanding to know where she was the night before. The raid and intensity of this, along with her reaction, are key factors in the loss of Chihiro’s job. Soon, Kojima comes to the house and is shocked and scared away but Chihiro’s admission of the past and current “rape relationship” involving Hirokawa. With Kojima gone, Chihiro has nothing to keep her from going over the edge. One day as Hirokawa is taking a bath, Chihiro beats his head against a wall with a water bottle, eventually killing him. Soon, a nervous, tedious business man, Nogami (Shunsuke Matsuoka) arrives. He, too, was involved in Chihiro’s rape back in their home town. When Nogami sees Hirokawa’s body stuffed in Chihiro’s refrigerator, he meets the same fate as his predecessor. To accommodate the new body, Chihiro orders two large, industrial-grade freezers and puts the bodies in them. Predictably, the third rapist, an ex-con by the name of Baba (Naoto Takenaka), is stronger and more resilient, but Chihiro slaughters and freezes him before long as well. This all occurs by the hour mark, and the final half hour or so takes Chihiro’s insanity, brought upon by the recollection of her rape and the brutal ways in which she slays her rapists, to new levels. The ending is a big mesh of sex, violence, and predictability that is surprisingly well executed and almost satisfying, until you realize that the film has gone nowhere.

With Freeze Me, director Takashi Ishii takes his trademark violence, feminism, and visual inventiveness to new levels, though luckily he doesn’t try to out-do any other directors with rape—there is surprisingly (and thankfully) only brief, sporadic sequences of rape that are not graphic in the least. The violence from Chihiro, on the other hand, is quite extreme; so extreme, in fact, that at times it’s almost funny in a dark, disturbing way. The butcherings of her rapists grow both in force and in graphicness to the point where the victim, Chihiro, and much of the scene is painted in blood. While the violence is portrayed in a very gritty, realistic way, the deaths are often almost beautiful. When around the hour mark the bodies are locked up in the freezers as Chihiro chats with them, the frozen condensation and bloody blue corpses make for such an original, and indeed almost beautiful, framing for Chihiro that their presence in freezers littering Chihiro’s living room floor seems almost natural. Visuals are definitively among the film’s strong points.

The performances are also chillingly convincing. Inoue is particularly good in the title role, believably portraying Chihiro’s explosive range of emotions such that you never question the film. Without her, this would be no more than a well shot, but average, piece of exploitation cinema. Though she isn’t enough to save the film, she does lift it far above the likes of most exploitation cinema. Her performance alone, likely helped along by writer/director Ishii, makes the film almost as much a character study as it is emotional manipulation. The all-male supporting cast all bring sparks of life to their cookie-cuttered extreme characters. There are no real stand-outs among them, but they all appear to give almost everything they’ve got to their performances and greatly aid the film’s attempt at rising above the genre.

Sadly, neither director nor cast can save the film from its own meaningless plot. Though filled with some interesting ideas and characters, Freeze Me has no real point to it in the end. It has aspects of social commentary, but most seem to simply say “rape (murder) is bad” or “rape (murder) is destructive” which are, hopefully, givens to any modern person. With no place to go, Freeze Me sinks and takes the easy way out almost from the beginning, disgusting and shocking the viewer into remembering it. If you’re into that kind of thing, no doubt you will fall in love with the film. The rest of us will grow attached to Inoue’s Chihiro and wish the film, like the raping, never happened. Recommended to exploitation fans and anyone addicted to the director or actress; everyone else would do themselves a favor in staying away.

REVIEW: Even as I write this review, I still have mixed feelings about this film. Maybe because FREEZE ME is more like an erotic thriller than a psychological study on rape in Japan, yet it all feels like one abstract joke from director, Takashi Ishii, in creating one hell of a dark comedy.

What starts out as an atmospheric thriller filled with creeps and beeps and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night turns into an almost different film halfway through and all into the third act. When Chihiro, (Harumi Inoue) begins storing her victims in the titled themed freezers, she transforms from a stable woman living the life into a neurotic killer trapped in an apartment. Not only does she have to confront the demons of her past but she must escape it at the same time without anyone knowing, even her current boyfriend. This could be an interesting concept, considering the particulars of Japan and the way women are generally portrayed in these types of film. If this film was a little more serious on its subject, it could have been frightening and almost uneasy, but when Chihiro begins joking to herself on the phone about new models of refrigerators and talking to the dead bodies of her rapist, FREEZE ME develops into hilariously dark story.

Japanese nude model, Harumi Inoue, known for her curves and vibrant smile sets the tone for the picture by portraying Chihiro in a happy-go-lucky manner. It seems almost natural that a victim of rape would take a similar attitude in her attempts of shadowing the incident from her life. And though I may be unsure of how I feel about FREEZE ME, one thing is for sure, I found a new actress to fall in love with. This is probably the sole reason why I stopped taking the film so seriously after the half. In the beginning, Inoue takes a simple attitude towards her life; she has the job, the nice boyfriend and the cozy wonderful apartment with a Sony Playstation. Though, it's fairly easy to worry for her and to be sympathetic, her defensive attitude is so cute and comedic that you begin falling for her. There is one fascinating scene where she's eating ice cream and talking it out with one of the rapists as they lay dead in the freezer. The camera is on the inside, so the body is in the foreground while she's only seen through the bridge of the neck and it's almost romantic in that sick, unadulterated type of way. It is around this time when the film feels different; an odd transition of what you saw before and what you will see in the end as her form of hysteria radically changes into different shapes and approaches.

The supporting cast of FREEZE ME are all men, stereotypical characters that seem to have no life of their own other than their obsession with Chihiro. You have an unrestrained pervert to a tough talking yakuza that are so relentless in having their way with Chihiro, that it becomes too excessive and unbelievable. Even her boyfriend is extreme in his ways, a soft talking weak-willed fellow used as a metaphor for Chihiro's stability. But maybe that is the point, right? These men are devices of an overall society that objectifies women and Chihiro has to lay down her own justice, empowerment of the killing kind. She is what she is because of them after all.

While the story is simplistic in its structure and typical in plot, the driving force of the film is definitely Inoue and her character examination of Chihiro. She goes through many emotions paralleling the overall flow of the picture, from dreadful to dark humor and back again. The finale is one sinker for it comes from left field and out of the ballpark, but still satisfying enough to intrigue. Takashi Ishii has always been one of my favorite Japanese directors because of his films BLACK ANGEL and GONIN. Though the story is significantly different than those previously mentioned, FREEZE ME still carries his trademark direction and dark, moody cinematography and will definitely entertain, if not in content but in the actress, Harumi Inoue.

A disturbing thriller about Chirhiro, a woman trying to escape the memories of being raped by three men while they filmed the incident.

She leaves her hometown to start a new life and five years later is a professional working in Tokyo, engaged to one of her colleagues, Yusuke. Without warning, one of the rapists appears, and threatens to turn her life into a living hell with news that the other two are on their way with the videotape of the rape, and discloses the evidence to her fiancé.

Mad with fury and pushed to the limits of despair, Chirhiro resorts to extreme acts of revenge, intent on destroying these ghosts from her past forever.

In her apartment with Yusuke, just as it looks like she is rekindling her relationship, the electricity suddenly shortcuts--and a troubled and uncertain future meets her again as she faces the aftermath of her desperate, disturbing tactics...