In Shunya Ito’s Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, the titular penitentiary is mental rather than only physical. Its protagonist Nami Matsushima (Meiko Kaji), mostly called Matsu, is on the run with six other women, all of whom carry the history of institutional oppression on their psyches. The mean-spirited Hide Oba (Kayoko Shiraishi), who oscillates between victim and tormentor, is both an embodiment of that trauma and a reflecting mirror who casts the shadows of social violence back onto the world that circumscribed her in the first place. The first Female Prisoner Scorpion film was a comparatively uncomplicated slab of B-movie mischief, one of the more observant “women in prison” films of its era but broadly willing to color within the outline of its accepted genre. Ito’s sequel is a hallucinogenic waking nightmare, a follow-up that doesn’t so much expand as implode the original film’s exploration of carceral hierarchies and societal exploitation. In breaking down the confines of its genre, replacing a physically oppressive enclosure with a universe rendered almost completely ajar, Jailhouse cracks open the assumptions of its genre. While it is still superficially a revenge narrative, Ito frames it as a nasty-minded descent into psychic disfigurement, a long night of the soul in which imprisonment is an imagined space as much as a physical one. Where, the film asks, do you run when the prison is inside you?

While the first film was wiry and unkempt, a torrid thriller with tattered edges, Jailhouse has no edges. By the time Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 descends into an almost entirely abstract space, a forest of the damned for a Kabuki theater of the soul in which Kaji is an oracle of vengeance, it becomes clear just how far into uncharted territory Ito is willing to go. Vivid and vital, it is an episodic tour of fugitivity not only for the characters, on the run from a society that subjects them to physical cruelty and relegates them to material and mental subservience, but for a conception of society that seems to be unraveling around us. By the mid-point, the film has unleashed its inner abyss, using cinema as a canvas not to stretch out a story or even, arguably, to define characters, but to deny us any ground to stand up. When Matsu and Hide have a conversation, the camera zooms into their faces and then rushes past them into a strange void, as though they are speaking with the cosmos, or the universe is having a conversation through them.

Whether or not they can connect with this cosmos is another story. After an act of self-abnegating violence, Hide turns away from Matsu, her eyes creeping toward the camera and her face hardening into a Noh mask of immovable woe. She has turned the terror of the world into cruel mask, a grotesque parody of social misogyny that perpetuates the destruction of her own humanity in the very act of lashing back out. Hide’s brutality suggests that the violence on their bodies inform their souls. At one point, in a pure psychic space in which any pretensions of realism have been washed away in the film’s acid bath of style, a tribunal of men appear, stripped of any physical bearing but somehow enhanced in the mind. These are projections of the power they fled from, a phantasmagorical court judging them for sins that vary widely across the spectrum of morality. By the point when Ito’s camera captures each woman in a 360-degree pan, many bodies frozen in gestures of frailty and vengeance, the film has revealed that this is no collective image of uplift, no heroic narrative of feminine self-emancipation.

More accurately, we might say that it stages a shared ritual of mutual loss and tenuous fellowship. The film a strange funeral for these revenants of womanhood, fugitives from the world wandering through the ruins of the mind in search of a self that is free from the images that still bind them. Most of the physical victories are pyrrhic. Although the sight of an abusive guard’s genitals impaled by a giant wooden phallus, the architecture of domination metaphorized in an obscene comic gesture, hits hard, the women are subjected to equally expressionistic images of corporeal violence. When one woman is raped and thrown over a waterfall, the film cuts to a crimson cascade that would make Stanley Kubrick blush. When Matsu and a wounded Hide schlep over a literal paper mountain of trash, the possibility that there is a world worthy of excavating from the detritus of a failed modernity seems limited to say the least.

Retribution, if it comes at all, is in art’s momentary capacity to bear tribute, to offer these women one final glimpse of a world denied them. In her final, avenging angel attired, Matsu appears like the embodied specter of cinema itself. Arriving out of nowhere, she attacks the prison warden, slashing not only at him but at his image, tearing the screen in half. Each cut, matched to her blade, ruptures the text across time and space, a cinematic wound enacting the violence of the film’s world back onto the contours of the text itself, literalizing the search for another world, the dim hope that whatever new image appears might not be this one. In her final blow, she stabs his sunglasses and his false eye. Within its iris, the collective vision denied the women in life finally manifests in monstrous form. In this fake eye, a potent symbol of film’s own distorted vision that the film acknowledges is both fraudulent and lyrical, their hope is refracted into a final constellation of the women running forever, in search of a world outside of this film. This baroque monstrosity of a text, avowedly surrealist in its refusal of the world, pushes beyond the fringes of its society. Severed from his body, from the masculine gaze that destroyed them, the artificer’s gaze seems to be a weapon of rebellion, or at least of an imagination outside it all. For these outcasts from the world, the artificer’s gaze becomes a faint and hazy crystal ball, a parting gift given to them by the poetic gaze that gives them a freedom that the world could not.

Score: 9/10